Re: The joy of FORTRAN

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 ....