On Tue, 21 Feb 2023 23:20:03 GMT, Martin Buchholz <mar...@openjdk.org> wrote:
>> "oldest trick in the book" is a phrase that does not necessarily imply >> existence of an actual book! >> >> Let this evoke an image of a **personal** book of tricks that programmers in >> the 1960s might have recorded such techniques in. And the tricks were >> passed down across generations of programmers! > > More to the point, ASCII was obviously **designed** to allow you to uppercase > a lower case letter with a single instruction, so "the book" might have been > a draft standard before they scrubbed out the interesting history! Thanks Martin, I will from now on envision a stack of dusty punch cards with carefully scribbled notes on the back, barely held together with a dry and cracked rubber band. More to the point: Do you have an opinion on the appropriate level of documentation / comments for this kind of 'tricky' code? My goal is that future maintainers should not get scared by the code and help them understand why it became what it is. ------------- PR: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/12632
