Re: TeX and Pascal [was Re: The joy of FORTRAN]

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 01/10/2024 15:57, Pancho wrote:

In essence just because you can do something clever, doesn't mean you
should.

 
That is what I loathed about compscis. As practising software engineers
we specialised in 'good clean workmanlike well documented and structured
 code'.
Our job was to get the puter to do its job in the most understandable
and maintainable way.
Not to impress people with the elegance complexity and
incomprehensibility of our  REGEX statements.
 
If all we had was vi and a C compiler, that's what we used.
And knowing that
 p=(x>y?3:2);
produced identical assembler to:
if (x>y)
p=3;
else
p=2;
there was a strong temptation to use the latter as being sufficiently
simple for the time serving amateurs whose failure to complete the
project was why we we employed at all...
 
We weren't employed to be clever. We were employed to write working
code. And document it.
 

That’s one of the things I dislike about C. It can obfuscate a simple
operation like that. Maybe in the days to 10CPS TTYs terseness had it’s
usefulness, but it’s been long since time when it’s been better to write a
bit more in the interest of readability.

--
Pete