Re: Side-effect arithmetic again [was: Ada ... in embedded systems]

[tojst1+@pitt.edu (Tore Joergensen)]

Robert A Duff (bobduff@world.std.com) wrote:
: Pardon my saying so, but that's complete nonsense.  You can't understand
: Ada programs without understanding the semantics of Ada, whether or not
: your identifiers are verbose or terse.  Furthermore, it is completely
: irrelevant whether random folks off street can understand your Ada code.

Partly true. You can't start changing the code without knowing the language,
but it isn't allways true that you can't get a fairly good idea about how
the program works without knowing the language, if the language/identifiers
are close to English (or another human language). This may or may not be
important, depending on the project. 

: What matters is whether a professional programmer, who knows the
: language, can understand the code well enough to modify it without
: breaking it.

This is of course important, but in some cases it will also be important
that people that cooperate with you (which may not be a programmer, or
at least not an Ada-programmer) can get a fairly good understanding
of what the program does. Of course the documentation will do most of that
job, but readable code doesn't hurt :-).
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