I agree -- Jan's comments really aren't comments. The person who can't figure out that

++dest;

means "increment destination pointer" shouldn't be working as a programmer.

The thread about hooking SDRAM up to an 8051 made me go back and look at some Verilog for an SDRAM controller that I'd written a couple of years ago. (Verilog has all of C's problems, as well as some interesting ones of its own.) Because this SDRAM controller is tightly integrated into a DMA controller and a PCI target controller, it's not very straightforward. There are a bunch of assignments that are simply written:

assign WriteOutputFIFO = 
 ((isTrgtMem && user_rdwr && user_mult && ~TrgtEndOfRow) ||
  (isTxDma && ~xfpf_latch && ~TxEndOfRow);

Above this tough-to-parse assignment is a detailed, twenty-line comment explaining the logic behind the logic. There's no way I'd remember why I wrote this the way I did, and the documentation above the assignment details the conditions expected, as well as how the signal will be used in other parts of the module.

Finally, code can be self-documenting. Rather than calling a variable i or cnt or some such, give it a real name: TargetAddress or LoopCount or something. It's not FORTRAN here and we're not limited to eight significant characters!

-a