On one of the kernel news groups, Torvalds threw his toys out of the pram over “brain-damaged stupid networking comment syntax style”.

This is the sort of thing that miffs him.

/* This is a multi-line format.
It does not look bad to us, but Linus hates it becasue it is not balanced */

“If the networking people cannot handle the pure awesomeness that is a balanced and symmetric traditional multi-line C style comments, then instead of the disgusting unbalanced crap that you guys use now, please just go all the way to the C++ mode.”

That is fighting talk in the Linux community where people have been killed for less.

Torvalds writes that he wants comment styles have a certain visual symmetry and balance. It would probably be fine, but for the fact that following an internet law which states that if any comments on grammar or spelling, their post will have at least one such mistake in it, Torvalds misspelt symmetry.

He said that “networking code picked *none* of the above sane formats... but picked these two models that are just half-arsed shit-for-brains.

“I'm not even going to start talking about the people who prefer to 'box in' their comments, and line up both ends and have fancy boxes of stars around the whole thing," he adds. "I'm sure that looks really nice if you are out of your mind on LSD, and have nothing better to do than to worry about the right alignment of the asterisks.”

Torvalds snarled that if people thought this comment punctuation was ok then it was time to “start moving the whole kernel over to the C++ style.”

For now, he writes “I really don't understand why the networking people think that their particularly ugly styles are fine. They are the most visually unbalanced version of _all_ the common comment styles, and have no actual advantages.”