Re: Parsing timestamps?

On 26/06/2025 5:12 pm, Paul Rubin wrote:

dxf <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:

Define 'unreadable'.  In general I don't need to understand the nitty
gritty of a routine.  But should I and no stack commentary exists, I've
no objections to creating it.  It's par for the course in Forth.  If it
bugged me I wouldn't be doing Forth.

 
Unreadable = I look at the code and have no idea what it's doing.  The
logic is often obscured by stack manipulation.  The values in the stack
are meaningful to the program's operation, but what is the meaning?  In
most languages, meaningful values have names, and the names convey the
meaning.  In Forth, you can write comments for that purpose.  Years
after cmForth was published, someone wrote a set of shadow screens for
it, and that helped a lot.
 
With no named values and no explanatory comments, the program becomes
opaque.

Yet forthers have no problem with this.  Take the SwiftForth source code.
At best you'll get a general comment as to what a function does.  How do
they maintain it - the same way anyone proficient in C maintains C code.
Albert is correct.  Familiarity is key to readability.  That's not to say
code deserving documentation shouldn't have it.  OTOH one shouldn't be
expecting documentation (including stack commentary) for what's an everyday
affair in Forth.