Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!uflorida!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Efficiency AND Readability
Message-ID: <8839@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 10 Nov 88 00:46:52 GMT
References: <141@twwells.uucp> <3386@geaclib.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 19

In article <3386@geaclib.UUCP> daveb@geaclib.UUCP (David Collier-Brown) writes:
>  A good counter-example to the claim that efficient code is
>unreadable (and also the claim that its non-portable) exists in the
>TeX typesetting implementation.
>  The author was concerned with all three, and so invented a
>language (formerly called DOC, now WEB) to allow the three to
>coexist.  Regrettably, it works best for monstrous great books, not
>little critical bits...

WEB has little to do with portability; in fact Knuth relied heavily
on the existence of an OTHERWISE clause in CASE statements throughout
the TEX source, and that is not standard Pascal.  There is also debate
about whether WEB is really worthwhile; a couple of years ago in the
Programming Pearls column in CACM, Knuth contributed a WEB example
which Doug McIlroy really tore apart.

We should probably limit the code readability discussion to code
as it is prepared for a standard compiler, not a version requiring
preprocessing with some additional tool.