Inline comments: not all cases should require a full stop, exclamation mark, or question

And should not remain when code is final

No, I want them in there, it's a tutorial module, and I want to be able to use inline comments for educational purposes:

I want to be able to say for example that something needs to be refactored, and I want to be able to easily search for it in NetBeans IDE, which means also sometimes indeed after a statement, like this

$thing = new Thing("oops made self"); // REFACTOR: use factory

As long as it's not over 80 lines that should be fine.

For what it's worth, I don't think code is ever "final". I like sometimes to leave remarks and records of what I have done (including what did not work, such as code) for the world to see. If I use say inline comments on code, Coder complains about rules that are intended for text, not for code, or for code-like tag words like // DEBUG, which belong on the same statement line.

An exclamation mark on say //DEBUG! (oops, habit, am meant to write // DEBUG! with a space of course):

dpm($var); // DEBUG!

I can then search on that easily in NetBeans and the search results show the code that I marked.

You would want to spend your time changing

// TODO

to

// @todo Update this

I can do this easily, and turns out NetBeans already supports '@todo'.

For NetBeans Users

For whatever reason, the capital TODO has been the convention in NetBeans IDE. See for example (note article title has 'TODO' upper case) Show TODO comments in the Task List window of NetBeans.

We can define which keywords make up a TODO comment. In Tools | Options | Miscellaneous | ToDo Tasks we can define patterns, which make up a TODO comment. If the pattern is found in a source file, it will show up in the Taks [sic] List window.

The article is followed by a table figure that shows both @todo and TODO and others already there (that is from 2008, so older Netbeans). In NetBeans8.0 I found it instead under:

Tools | Options | Team | Action Items

See also NetBeans8.0 help, just search for todo. My fresh NetBeans8.0 install already had: @todo, TODO, FIXME, XXX, PENDING …

So maybe the rule could be updated with a pattern to allow sentence followed by url?

At least. One currently also can't use inline comments to comment out code, or code-like words (other than @todo).

Does commented out code have to have a 'full stop, exclamation mark or question' at the end of it ?

I simply don't accept that Coder should flag on all commented out code, unless you introduce a STRICT mode and support other compliance levels corresponding to rule switch sets, in a Coder config file. Modules like mine, with other needs (educational, tutorial, UML friendly) can then choose to not use STRICT mode yet still benefit from Coder.

Otherwise it just pollutes the output from Coder, and makes it hard to catch other errors that matter more (than harmless commented out code).

Related: #2463409: Request shortcuts for @codingStandardsIgnoreStart/@codingStandardsIgnoreEnd.

@YesCT wrote:

Those look like temporary comments used while developing. And should not remain when code is final. So errorring on them seems appropriate.

And exactly when, may I ask, is code ever 'final' ?

Besides, I have compelling educational reasons to leave certain marker comments in the code, and I simply do not agree that all inline comments require punctuation at the end, or that very brief inline comments should not follow code on the same line (noting that I am nevertheless doing my best to adhere to these rules, assisted by TIP: PHPCSMD: a plugin for PHP Code Sniffer compatible with NetBeans8 and the Drupal Coding Standards from Coder).