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From: jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: named parameters and verbosity [was: Functions without side effects]
Message-ID: <1991Jun29.001927.18591@netcom.COM>
Date: 29 Jun 91 00:19:27 GMT
References: <130242@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <4888@osc.COM> 	<72893@microsoft.UUCP> <1991Jun21.013944.23970@netcom.COM> 	<20445@alice.att.com> <1991Jun26.001847.24239@netcom.COM> 	<1991Jun26.185707.26149@visix.com> <1991Jun27.052157.2291@visix.com> 	<1991Jun27.232437.
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  UNIX System {408 241-9760 guest}
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amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker) writes:

>Jim, the onus is *always* on the programmer.  I have never seen any
>situation in which clear, legible code is easier to write than
>confusing, illegible code.  None.  Zip.  Nada.  Writing well requires
>skill and talent, whether you are writing C, Ada, or English.

Well, I guess we have to agree to disagree on this point. That it is
easier by far to write legible, unconfusing code than it is to write
illegible, confusing code seems axiomatic to me. If the code is confusing,
how then am I to debug it? Seems obvious--but you apparently disagree.
It has ALWAYS seemed more straightforward to me to write code that is
easy to read than to write code that is hard to read. To quote Dijkstra:
"I have a small brain, but I've learned to live with it". How anybody
can expend LESS energy writing hard-to-read code is beyond me. It would
require a great effort on my part to do so.

>Yo.  Even C has them.  Has had for, oh, ten years or so.  Modern compilers
>even typecheck them for you.  What a concept :).

Sorry, mea culpa. I read the original poster's example to be that he
was concocting some enumeration literals. What he was doing was quite
different--he was concocting some constants using #defines. I could
revisit the topic and rip into the notion of constants as macros, but
I think I'll just let it drop at this point.
-- 
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