I agree in that I'd much rather read terse expressive code than pages of dribble convey anything meaningful, having seen a lot of verbose code too. That said, code should be well formed. When I started out in C I only used curly braces when I needed to. After creating several bugs stemming from this I now add them as a rule of thumb. That particular issue is compounded here by the fact that multiple statements are shoved on a single line - also poor form.