[TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a user stand point [was dmr note on BSD's sins]

[Toby Thain]

On 2017-05-05 10:16 PM, Noel Hunt wrote:
> ...
> Donald Knuth wrote a long, beautifully crafted program in some
> pseudo-code.  Doug McIlroy provided an alternative solution:
>

Much as I love Professor Knuth, he is still doing this. He always was a 
low level coder*, and his programs are longer and more complicated than 
the high level equivalents, by the expected factors. (If anyone doubts 
it, note that he adopted C after Pascal, and many of his programs are 
linked from his web pages.) No doubt he has solid rationalisations for 
taking this approach for his purposes, but of course it's not ideal for 
all situations.

--Toby


* - Many of us will remember we were expected to understand TAOCP 
through MIX. And he started out like this:
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/donald-knuths-first-computer/