On 31/05/2026 17:04, Tim Rentsch wrote:Richard Harnden <richard.nospam@gmail.invalid> writes:>
just write complex expressions in a way that a human can most
easily understand,
Unfortunately, (1) different people have different ideas of what
writing is most easily understood, and (2) different readers have
different notions of which writings are easily understood, and
which writings are not so easily understood. To make things
worse "easily understood" is not a boolean condition, nor is it
necessarily well-ordered -- "most easily understood" isn't always
a well-defined quality, even for a given audience.
Sadly the idea of writing in a way that is "most easily understood"
has resulted in a race to the bottom, where writers are more and
more encouraged to take the view that (some) readers are pretty
much arbitrarily stupid, with the result that expressions become
littered with scads of unnecessary parentheses that actually
detract from ease of reading. Good writing is always a balance
between too much and too little.
Actual examples of too many parentheses?
I was working on some code in a Unix-like kernel the other day
where the original author wrote, `if ((a == 0) && (b == 1))`
type expressions. The inner parentheses were totally
superfluous. I removed them.
As Tim wrote, there's obviously a balance to be struck between
excessive verbosity and extreme concision. Over time,
programmers working in a language (or a code base) do tend to
internalize that some operations are more frequently
misunderstood than others, and parenthesize accordingly.
- Dan C.
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