Re: Where can i get the design documentation for core utils?

[David Feuer]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 03:15:26PM +0200, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> address@hidden (David Feuer) writes:
> 
> > It is surely true that I am not the best programmer in the world.  But
> > when faced by things like glibc-2.3.5/locale/coll-lookup.c I suspect
> > even a fancy New York keyboard jockey would wonder just what it was all
> > about.
> 
> It's actually rather easy to grok, just some multi-level table lookup,
> with each level being indexed by different bit fields from the key as
> described by the first five entries in the table.  And the variable are
> named with quite descriptive names.

But what is being looked up in what table?  The _purpose_ of a function
should be described in internal documentation, unless it is really
obvious.  Wacky bit-shifting in unrolled loops can be easy to read, but
only when documentation gives the reader a clue of the overall purpose
and structure.  You seem to prefer to blame C for the problem than the
lack of documentation.  C is not my favorite programming language either
(I much prefer the strong type systems of ML and Haskell), but that's
just not fair.  It's possible to write perfectly readable code in any
practical programming language.  Please don't mention INTERCAL,
unlambda, or anything like them.

David