🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Snews.960817.230232.chris.1467@keris.demon.co.uk>
           chris@keris.demon.co.uk "Chris Croughton" writes:

> In article <840230240snz@pdlmail.demon.co.uk>
>            pete@pdlmail.demon.co.uk "Peter Disdale" wrote:
> 
> >Smidgeons OTOH (SMall Increases Due to Generalised Encoding,
> >Optimised Not-a-lot) are normally down to inadequacies of the
> >compiler, though can be caused by inelegant code construction.
> 
> Or even more by *elegant* code construction - the sort of code which is
> easy to understand and maintain is seldom the most efficient, even with
> modern optimising compilers...

There *is* a programming methodology that can produce elegant,
maintainable code, and yet be as efficient as you can make it, along with
a level of productivity (counted as lines of fully debugged code) that's
higher than writing in plain C.  This is CWeb, an updating of Prof.
Donald Knuth's concept of "Literate Programming".  See the newsgroup 
comp.programming.literate for pointers to the FAQs and the software.  It
has the advantage of also making the program source into an expositionary
tool for publication.

Niel Kempson and I did some work using CWeb a few years ago and were
churning out 5 times as much fully-debugged code as were those others
that were using ordinary C.

(I've even toyed with the idea of rewriting KA9Q in CWeb, but quickly
suppressed the thought!)

-- 
Brian {Hamilton Kelly}                                         bhk@dsl.co.uk
                Tony Blair's New Labour: The Windows'95 of Political Parties
             (c/w Plug'n'Pray and a pretence of offering object-orientation)