C Programming Style -- New thought

Barry Shein root at bu-cs.UUCP
Wed Jul 31 12:36:34 AEST 1985


Re: White space in programs...

I remember Alan Perlis saying one night that he disliked Pascal-like
languages (that is, languages with an indenting style) because when you
listed them on the screen the screen was mostly covered with white space
and hence minimized information transfer.

As I remember he went on to speak about a 1000 line APL program which
was a Fortran compiler, that was 132 cols of APL per line, he liked to
give it to people to modify (I think that was at Yale, Yalies?)

There's no accounting for taste.

[in all fairness this is out of context and more than a few years old
and from my memory although I don't think it is a gross
misrepresentation.]

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

P.S. Hint: don't bother quoting this and taking it apart point by point.



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