XPost: alt.folklore.computers
From: Peter@Iron-Spring.com

On 1/1/26 05:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 01/01/2026 03:07, c186282 wrote:
>> On 12/31/25 17:35, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>> On 31/12/2025 19:21, c186282 wrote:
>>>> I've writ stuff with five or six levels of nesting
>>>>    but don't like it, usually if/then/else stuff. Oft
>>>>    re-did it later to be more easy to follow. IMHO
>>>>    readability/comprehensibility is as important as
>>>>    functionally correct code.
>>>
>>> 100% agree.
>>>
>>> Often write little functions that are only called once. Merely to
>>> lexically separate atomic functional blocks.
>>>
>>> No idea whether the compiler/linker inlines them or not.
>>>
>>> There is nothing worse than making top level decisions followed by
>>> some nitty detail to detect some low level error.
>>>
>>> e.g. assume a call to allocate memory always works or the call will
>>> do the appropriate jump to a global error handler to abort things
>>> cleanly.
>>>
>>> The point of structure was supposed to be to elucidate program flow,
>>> not obscure it with elegant formally correct cruft.
>>
>>
>>    Agree.
>>
>>    As I've said before, I'm still quite fond of Pascal and
>>    write apps of various size in it (oft first proto-ed
>>    in Python). The structure is 'elegant', but you CAN
>>    carry it TOO far, to where it gets in the way instead
>>    of helping things.
>>
> My one and only  experience of trying to make Pascal do what was trivial
> in 'C' led me to resolve never ever to touch it again.
>
> If you are trying to write - as it turned out I was - a disk driver in
> pascal, where a given sector may be a byte stream, a series of 16 bit
> integers,  or a structure defined by thee first few bytes in the sector,
> you end up with a massive union that is so cumbersome it is almost
> impossible to read - let alone use.

Doesn't Pascal have variant records?

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)