On 1/3/08, douglas edric stanley <destanley_at_mac.com> wrote:
> for(char*i="Hello"; *i!='\0'; ++i) std::cout << *i << std::endl;
>
> I'm sorry to offend all the robots out there, but
> that's totally unreadable unless you understand
> the underlying architecture of the computer.
So, this program is more then just a sequence of characters.
C++ is a language, not just "language", it is unreadable unless you
learn it, and often knowledge of culture of C++ programming and its
ancestry helps to read more in it. this extra can only be understood
by human readers and is meaningless to computers.
This fragment unambigously communicates to computer to print
Hello
It also communicates to the readers of this list that C++ may look scary.
It also contains at least two references to the programming culture:
output of "Hello" as variation of "Hello, world!" and using of "i" as
a loop counter.
Further it uses unconventional code layout to stress the point it
tries to communicate to us, humans.
It fails to communicate much to non-speakers just as unfamiliar
natural language would.
> Knitting is beautiful,
> coding is ugly. Sure, I absolutely love the above
> C++ code, I find it -- gasp -- kind of lovely, at
> least fascinating. But it's still very geeky and
> bastardly, i.e. ugly in the etymological sense:
> it's dreadful.
it is dreadful because you wanted to communicate dread - so it works
as intended while still printing
Hello
Now, not many dreadful stories in the history of literature can print
Hello
> Haskell is still pretty unreadable, therefore a
> bit of a kludge. But at least it looks unreadable
> from the get-go and doesn't pretend otherwise.
Korean is pretty unreadable to me. And Thai.
--
cheers,
artm
http://lab.v2.nl/
Received on Thu Jan 03 2008 - 22:00:17 GMT