Editing GNU coding standards (section)

==Comments==

The standards greatly emphasise the importance of [[English-language]] [[Comment (computer programming)|comments]]:

<blockquote>Please write the comments in a GNU program in English, because English is the one language that nearly all programmers in all countries can read.  If you do not write English well, please write comments in English as well as you can, then ask other people to help rewrite them.  If you can't write comments in English, please find someone to work with you and translate your comments into English.</blockquote>

Comments should consist of complete, capitalized sentences, each followed by two spaces (so that Emacs can tell where one sentence ends and the next begins).

For long or complex preprocessor conditionals, every <code>#else</code> and <code>#endif</code> should have a comment explaining the condition for the code below (for <code>#else</code>) or above (for <code>#endif</code>).