🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <jls.672366979@rutabaga>, jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) writes:
: I take it then you've never read the C book written by one of the
: language's inventors? You know, the one with all the one and two
: character identifier names? And I take it that you've never seen
: 'i' used as the control variable on a "for" loop? I mean, really,
: I've seen ZILLIONS of one or two character identifier names. That
: the code you've read and the code I've read have been disjoint sets
: seems to defy the laws of probability. Are you sure you don't want
: to retract your above claim? "Never" is a rather strong statement.

Two character variable names are not the only problem, having MEANINGFUL
variable names is another problem.  Granted I come from a university
environment where some asses actually take pride in writing routines
that no one else can read.  For example, I have seen old girlfriend
names used for variables.  I have seen cities in denmark used for
variable names.  I would say the BIGGEST single abuse of variable
names (besides the sequence 'i', 'ii', 'iii' and 'iiii' for which
I royally flamed the author) is the variable sequence 'flag', 'flag2'
up to 'flagn'.  YES I KNOW ITS A FLAG, but it gives no indication of
WHAT the flag is used for!

Now to get back to comp.lang.misc, these abuses can be done in any language.
While Ada seems to be a bit wordy, the emphasis does seem to be more on
readable code rather than C's effort at going to obscure code.  Granted
I tend to go too far the other way, but I have NEVER had someone ask me
"What does routine 'get_functions_using_prototyping' do?" (this is a
real function name used in a rather large REXX program).


-- 
Kenneth Ng
Please reply to ken@hertz.njit.edu until this machine properly recieves mail.
"No problem, here's how you build it" -- R. Barclay, ST: TNG