I checked with Glenn Vanderburg to be sure I was remembering the following story correctly. This comment by Chip Davis reminded me of it:
On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, Chip Davis wrote: ... > there comes a time when one must eschew elegance > (and perhaps some efficiency) on behalf of the poor schmuck > who will need to read, understand, and/or modify your code later. > Especially if that poor schmuck might be yourself. David Lippke was an inspiration to me while at Texas A&M. He and Pete Reynolds installed UTS on VM/HPO on one of the Amdahl's. I'll skip that story and ASCII and all that for now, but Lippke was exceptionally bright. (Remember "Bitnet 1/2", the TCP/IP over RSCS project he did with Bruce Crabill? Stuff like that.) So ... one day Dave-o was eyeballing some code (probably C) and struggling to figure out what the author was trying to accomplish. This was apparently a really tricky statement. (PARSE? stem vars? bah!) The comment read roughly, "If you don't understand what this does, then you shouldn't be reading my code!". Thereafter, he never again wrote such comments. (He was, in fact, the author of that code.) Funny, but eduficational. -- R; <><
