Re: Colored Code

[John Bartol <johnbartol -at- shaw -dot- ca>]

As one of the other respondents mentioned, the audience is important.

If you are indeed producing this documentation for use by developers, then  
having the colored code could be useful. If the audience is *not*  
developers (coders, that is), then it really won't make a difference to  
them (classical Greek and modern Greek are both Greek to non-Greek  
speakers :-)

Okay, back to the code.

If the code snippets that you are including are very small (at most, one  
function) *and* include minimal, unobtrusive comments, then the addition  
of color is not very important. The developer will be able to *see* each  
discrete element of the code.

If, however, the code is long, or complex, coloring is very beneficial.  
Comments in C, for example, can cross multiple lines, beginning and ending  
with "/*" and "*/". Many coders will include real code *within* a comment  
for testing purposes (they will uncomment the code to test, then recomment  
so it doesn't execute). In a complex comment, this can be hard to see  
without coloring.

So... it really comes down to the actual content and the intended  
audience. As a former developer, I can honestly tell you that the ability  
of an editor (and by inference, documentation) to display code with  
color-tags was a true god-send.


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