teco VS jsource

Code formatting is all about matching the impedance of the source code to that of the human author/readers of the code. The development of literature suggest that innovation in this area will continue for a very long time.

I myself am a huge fan of Pascal, and limiting code to one function per line. I find that clever/terse code is unmaintainable code.

Here's some code I wrote back in 1991 for a TECO clone that reflects that style. Looking back, I think some things could have a few more comments, but it seems fairly easy to read the intent of the code.

https://github.com/mikewarot/teco

The one other example I know that morphs the language to that extent and to the detriment of readability by C programmers is the J interpreter[1,2]. But, once again, nobody (that I’ve read) claims it’s good or clear C. (Good C for those who speak J, maybe; I wouldn’t know.)

For a way to morph C syntax that does make things better, see libmill[3].

[1] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum

[2] https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource/tree/master/jsrc

[3] https://250bpm.com/blog:56/

Oh damn Whitney C representation.

I develop J btw

No, it was rhetorical, because it's obviously (to an APL-family programmer), not bad!

Your cultural prejudice is showing. There are good reasons APL is written the way it is, and this example is simply bringing those benefits to C by writing it in the dense APL style. There are other APL derivatives, like J[1] that are written the same way. These projects are well-maintained. They aren't collapsing under a load of technical debt. The style works. To them, it's clean code.

[1]: https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource

Recently, I wanted to write a simple piece of code in J, but immediately found a bug. I went ahead to fetch the source to see if I can fix it. But, hell no. I couldn't believe my eyes. Is this how someone programs, really? I just can't believe it didn't go through some kind of obfuscator.

Here are some samples, but almost anything in the repository is beyond me:

https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource/blob/master/jsrc/xo.c

You can view the code, but is not open source: https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource/blob/master/license.txt

This is the same dense style used in J.

All-in-all this example doesn't seem too bad. It's clear what happens and is easy to follow. If you wan't to see something remarkably terribly, check out Whitney style. It's used in APL/J/K family interpreters. Keep in mind, financial institutions run that code.