Re:Tim Bray doesn't know operator precedence rules
by petewarden on Wednesday June 30, 2010 @10:48AM
(#1474970)
> I found that spending a lot of time reading other people's code dramatically improved the readability of my own code.
This I wholeheartedly agree with. I spent the first five years of my career porting large hairy codebases from PCs to embedded devices, without the original programmers available, and that has given me a drastically different code style to a lot of people.
> I venture to guess that his code is a little opaque in places without meaning to be, as a result of his not spending much time reading other people's code.
Here you lose me. I went out of my way to avoid memorizing the operator precedence rules too well, so that when I saw a complex one-line expression I'd have to stop and pay attention. A lot of the time the subtle bugs creep in because the naked expressions flow in a way that looks seductively correct, and so with an easy knowledge of precedence it's easy to make the same mistake as the original author.
As Bjarne S once said about casting in C++, I want it to look ugly in the code because it's an ugly idea. I want my code-reading to stumble when I hit those long unparenthesized expressions, to make sure I pay attention.
This I wholeheartedly agree with. I spent the first five years of my career porting large hairy codebases from PCs to embedded devices, without the original programmers available, and that has given me a drastically different code style to a lot of people.
> I venture to guess that his code is a little opaque in places without meaning to be, as a result of his not spending much time reading other people's code.
Here you lose me. I went out of my way to avoid memorizing the operator precedence rules too well, so that when I saw a complex one-line expression I'd have to stop and pay attention. A lot of the time the subtle bugs creep in because the naked expressions flow in a way that looks seductively correct, and so with an easy knowledge of precedence it's easy to make the same mistake as the original author.
As Bjarne S once said about casting in C++, I want it to look ugly in the code because it's an ugly idea. I want my code-reading to stumble when I hit those long unparenthesized expressions, to make sure I pay attention.