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

On 01/10/2024 23:39, Peter Flass wrote:

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.

I agree, but having worked on 10CPS TTYS, one appreciates 'ls' instead of listFiles
Now as far as I am concerned using a ? operator is to me no harder to understand than the word obfuscate. Its in the region of languages I know  well.
But there are some C syntaxes possible that are very hard for anyone except the compiler to follow.
I never managed to successfully declare an array of pointers to functions returning an integer.
But that might have been the primitive compilers.
--
"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
    - Leo Tolstoy