[TUHS] Re: Clever code

On 11 Dec 2022 18:15 -0800, from bakul(a)iitbombay.org (Bakul Shah): Performant code does not need to stand in opposition to clear code. And if you are writing performance-critical or size-critical code (such as the QNX microkernel that someone brought up), then of course you might end up needing to do things in non-obvious ways; that's not the point here. Clever is fine IMO _where the cleverness provides an actual benefit in a real-world scenario_, and an operating system kernel (and a language standard library) is a rather special type of program where sometimes you have to do things in somewhat non-obvious ways because of the environment the code is meant to execute in. But a significant portion of the time, where I see "clever" code there is _no_ significant benefit to the cleverness; it's often more about "showing off", or saving a few source code characters at the expense of at-a-glance readability, than it is about actual usefulness and necessity. Necessary complexity in order to solve the problem, combined with things like performance requirements, may sometimes require clever code. At that point, there is a benefit to the cleverness. But one can still aim to write the clever code _clearly_, with everything from comments to good variable and function names to formatting that enhances readability by for example grouping related operations together in the source code to keeping related parts grouped together and separate from other code. Just such a simple thing as that I often add extra parenthesis over and beyond what's actually required based on operator precedence, because doing so makes it clearer what goes together and unless the compiler is severely braindead by modern standards, doing so costs _nothing_ past the compilation stage. -- ✍  Michael Kjörling 🏡 https://michael.kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”