Java annotation for commented out code

Question

So like probably many people out there I usually comment out code temporarily, mostly for debugging purposes. I currently put something like **DEBUG** or whatever that is easily searched for, but I thought having the compiler output a warning (or even an error) whenever it finds code that is temporarily commented out could be useful. I thought of using an annotation, but annotations can't be used to mark comments.

Does anyone know of a better approach than putting an easily searchable string in the commented-out section of code?

Answer 1

there are plenty of code inspection tools out there that can alert you to the presence of code patterns that you define. most of them have built-in support for detecting common stuff like "//todo" comments left in code etc.

most IDEs support auto-detection of //todo as well (intellij idea, for example).

a common command-line tool for this is checkstyle. you could run it as part of your build and have it point these things out to you