Comment by cenamus
1 year ago
I recommend checking out more of the APL family language family and the history of the notation, highly interesting. Almost like a parallel universe of computing, when you look past the syntax.
1 year ago
I recommend checking out more of the APL family language family and the history of the notation, highly interesting. Almost like a parallel universe of computing, when you look past the syntax.
Yes, but C isn't APL. I don't buy it that this how it was written from day 1. Occam's razor and all, this is obfuscated C, not code written by an alien superintelligence.
Whitney is famous for writing code like this, it's been his coding style for decades.
For example, he wrote an early J interpreter this way in 1989. There's also a buddy allocator he wrote at Morgan Stanley that's only about 10 lines of C code.
https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum
https://github.com/tavmem/buddy/blob/master/a/b.c
When writing code in this manner, lines of code is kind of a meaningless metric. You could put the entire Linux kernel in one very long line of C.
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haven't you ever written code with single letter variable names and it makes sense to you? and then been forced to read somebody else's code with single character variable names and found it completely inscrutable? this is just that on (a lot of) steroids
No I don't write entire C programs with single letter variables, because there is no way where "c" is more readable than "cnt" or "count". With the usual exception of "for(int i", x, and y variable inside small scopes.
If I was paid by the hour to write C, then I'd use single letter variables too, but I'm too lazy to do twice the work, when I can make my life simpler.
Simplicity is a virtue, there is nothing interesting about complexity for complexity's sake.
In the words of Terry Davis: https://youtu.be/k0qmkQGqpM8?si=larQzV0Ngdba6vQI
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I've written code with single letter variable names lots if times! But later on it most certainly does not make sense to me.
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