Reading awc

While APL-styled C may be one extreme, I&#x27;ve noticed that average code has taken an uncomfortable shift in the other direction especially within the past decade, and I find it irritating to work with a lot of the &quot;modern&quot; stuff as it&#x27;s far too verbose and needlessly indirect. I suspect the rise of strongly lowest-common-denominator lame coding standards and the desire by corporations to make programmers easily replaceable dunces is to blame for that insipidness.<p>(Aside: odd domain names like the one in this article I normally ignore in search results since they&#x27;re usually full of SEO&#x27;d spam, but if one makes it to HN it&#x27;s usually worth a look.)

Reading code like this makes me better understand how the Shin Megami Tensei authors came up with the idea that a computer could channel demons.

I made some ~25 changes to the code[0], to show how some making some pretty minor changes can really improve readability, while still staying extremely tight. I don&#x27;t need everything spelled out for me, and in fact I prefer a horizontal style--I hate scrolling too. But Arthur Whitney&#x27;s code is deliberately obfuscating and IMO it tarnishes the positive aspects of the style.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;saulpw&#x2F;ksimple&#x2F;commits&#x2F;main&#x2F;a.c">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;saulpw&#x2F;ksimple&#x2F;commits&#x2F;main&#x2F;a.c</a>

Here&#x27;s an attempt to make the code in the first link [1] slightly more readable by replacing the most frequently occurring identifiers with visually distinctive Unicode characters :)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;F27ZNfk.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;F27ZNfk.png</a><p>At least it&#x27;s now much easier to spot multiple occurrences of the same identifier. All these unicode characters are still valid in C identifiers, by the way.[2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jsoftware.com&#x2F;ioj&#x2F;iojATW.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jsoftware.com&#x2F;ioj&#x2F;iojATW.htm</a><p>[2] I say &#x27;still&#x27; because C23 is set to follow C++ and take them all away by restricting identifiers to XID_Start&#x2F;XID_Continue. I find the whole XID_Start&#x2F;XID_Continue idea unmotivated, both philosophically speaking and from a practical point of view, but what can I do. I just hope languages like Julia, Swift, Racket, and Clojure don&#x27;t follow this trend anytime soon...

While the code may be elegant like the author suggests - I have never understood the coding style of <i>not</i> using descriptive variable and function names?<p>Is there any benefit that can&#x27;t be gained from using a minifier or transpiler?

Is there a way to read this style of C, without prior knowledge of APL, J, or K? Can people with prior knowledge read this more easily? I&#x27;m asking this because this is the first time I took the time to read that `j.c` and it wasn&#x27;t really any more readable than normal C code. I was expecting to &quot;read the C source in chunks&quot; but that didn&#x27;t really happen.