On 25/10/15 15:56, Geoff Canyon wrote:
But that's true now. *Every* time I look at someone else's code I have to spend
time figuring out their way of doing things.
Very true indeed.
When I was at the "University" of Abertay there was a lecturer
(who was, supposedly, teaching us Visual Basic 5 - but she knew less
than most of the students)
who told us we have to annotate our code "in case you are hit by a bus":
so every 2 or 3 lines of
code she had us write things like this:
--this moves the value in field "F1" to "F2"
and
--this is where the value of amortizement of second-hand cars is calculated
Of course this made any creativity re coding we might have had curl up
and die.
I suppose she was right; one should do that . . . but that's a bit like
the 50 year-old doctor
who tells undergraduate students that getting smashed out of their boxes
is bad for them . . .
Hey, we were all thundering round to the nearest bar like a herd of
half-starved bison
straight after her "lab sessions" !
I'm sure this is true whenever someone looks at my code as well. There can be
clearer and less clear code,
That's very true; but whether it being nearer to a 'natural language'
(e.g. English) or not makes it
any clearer isn't immediately obvious.
I've just trawled through a load of old printouts of some stuff I did
with FORTRAN IV in 1976 that my Mum had
hidden away as drawer liners in a chest: I didn't really have much
problem understanding what they were trying to do
even after 40 years and having almost totally forgotten FORTRAN. Nobody
can say that FORTRAN is like English.
I was looking inside a "teach yer-sel C++" book the other day, and I
hadn't an earthly:
but not, I suspect, because it is written in a way that looks nothing
whatsoever like English,
but simply because I have never learnt C++.
and obviously the situation could be made worse by bad extensions, but bad
extensions wouldn't survive.
Well, they will if, despite being written in obscurantist code they do
what they are meant to do.
gc
Richmond.
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