Have you never piped a config file through grep to exclude comments to get a streamlined view? It's pretty easy, and quickly gives you the best of both worlds.

Have you never piped a config file through grep to exclude comments to get a streamlined view? It's pretty easy, and quickly gives you the best of both worlds. Configure your editor of choice to collapse comments and that's an even more convenient interface. For stock configs that ship with a lot of comments, I would sometimes replace the file with one where I've stripped the comments. Since I always save the stock config as $FILE.dist, I get maximum usability. Never would I want the configs to no support comments though. Even after I've stripped configs, I might add my own comment to each change from the stock config, or for some test change I'm trying out. Not having comments means any documentation would need to be at least one degree removed from the item it's documenting. Sometimes that's acceptable, sometimes it's not.