Re: The joy of FORTRAN

c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:

On 2/28/25 7:39 AM, Bob Eager wrote:

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 02:34:52 +0000, rbowman wrote:
 

Sadly, macros made their way into C. The basic idea was fine but we had
one programmer who laid awake nights thinking up new perverted things to
do with macros. I forget if it was Kernighan or Ritchie who later said
if they had only known what people would do with them...

 
I probably do far too much with a standalone macro processor...

 
  It's unfortunately NOT hard to make 'C' *totally
  unreadable*, impossible to follow. Sometimes you
  see the young hot-shots cram a dozen lines worth
  of stuff into a single line with LOTS of punctuation
  characters and bracket tricks. It's also possible to
  obfuscate using too many, esp nested, macros.
 
  Thing is, those ultra-compacted lines don't really
  run any faster - the same functions and ops are
  being run regardless.
 
  Being kinda old-school my pgms always look like
  something from the K&R book, and with comments
  after almost every line. THAT you can read a
  day from now, or a year from now ....
 

Never can have enough comments. I usually use lots, but recently I was
looking over some of my old code and had a “what?” moment. It was obvious
when I wrote it.

--
Pete