In <[email protected]>, on 08/15/2010
at 06:39 PM, john gilmore <[email protected]> said:
>Arguing against 'readable and maintainable' code is very like arguing
>against motherhood, but this phrase nevertheless begs important
>questions. Simple is good, simplistic is bad. It is too easy to
>argue that something will someday be misunderstood by or unknown to
>some clot, notably in my very recent experience to argue that
>recursion is too difficult a notion for some programmers to grasp.
The terms are intended to refer to properly trained programmers.
>Indeed, my chief problem with Seymour's language is its ambiguity.
>It could be taken as an argument for writing, say,
>
>declare (pi value(3.14159_26535_89793_23846),
> sqrt_pi value(sqrt(pi)) binary float(52) ;
>
>instead of
>
>declare gamma_1half value(1.77245_38509_05516_02729) binary
>float(53) ;
Not honestly. If the code is intended to deal with a computation of
gamma functions, then I would regard the *first* form as needlessly
obscure. I might buy
declare (pi value(3.14159_26535_89793_23846),
sqrt_pi value(sqrt(pi)) binary float(52)
gamma_1half value(sqrt_pi) binary float(52) ;
although even then I would consider it clearer to simply write
declare gamma_1half value(1.77245_38509_05516_02729)
binary float(53)
/* gamma(1/2) = pi^.5 */ ;
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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