Javadoc for private classes methods

Question

I know the Javadoc tool is primarily used for documenting a public API.
Is it considered bad style ever to use it for internal documentation.... description of what private methods are for, why they were selected, etc. It seems like that could be useful too.
Thanks for any thoughts,
John

Answer 1

Hi,
As stated above, javadoc will not be generated for private methods if you don't use that switch. But that's not what I want to say...
javadoc should be used to document what a method does, and the expected arguments etc. It should not say how it solves it's problem (with a few exceptions, e.g. a sorting algorithm can state if it is stable or not, and best/wors case scenarios and execution times).
So I have adopted to some thins I saw a very long time ago, but I can't remember where. I usually document code in the following format.
* Javadoc
* Documentation of the method, arguments, etc.
/* Impl note:
* A note about how the method is implemented / a short note
* about things one have to think about etc.
public void method() {
}So I use both javadoc and implementation comments. (But implementation comments are only used if a method is complex or hard to understand)
/Kaj