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  • This is a good use of macros. I understand people are frightened by how it looks but it’s just C in a terse, declarative style. It’s mostly straightforward, just dense and yes - will challenge you because of various obscure macro styles used.

    I believe “oo” is probably an infinity error condition or some such not 100% sure. I didn’t see the author discuss it since they said it’s not used. Was probably used during development as a debug printout.

    by uvaursi
  • Kudos on not just taking a combative stance on the code!

    This was a very fun read that I'm fairly convinced I will have to come back to.

    by taeric
  • There are best or accepted practices in every field.

    And in every field they work well for the average case, but are rarely the best fit for that specific scenario. And in some rare scenarios, doing the opposite is the solution that fits best the individual/team/project.

    The interesting takeaway here is that crowd wisdom should be given weight and probably defaulted if we want to turn off our brains. But if you turn on your brain you will unavoidably see the many cracks that those solutions bring for your specific problem.

    by epolanski
  • Reminds me of Bourne's attempt at beating C into Algol: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh...

    Example: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh...

    by MisterTea
  • I was curious about Shakti after reading this and the comments, so followed the link to shakti.com on Wikipedia. It seems it now redirects to the k.nyc domain, which displays a single letter 'k'.

    I wondered if I was missing something, so looked at the source, to find the following:

      <div style='font-family:monospace'>k
    Nothing but that. Which is, surely, the HTML equivalent of the Whitney C style: relying on the compiler/interpreter to add anything implicit, and shaving off every element that isn't required, such as a closing tag (which, yes, only matters if you're going to want something else afterwards, I guess...). Bravo.
    by kolektiv
  • IMO this is a really good blog post, whatever you think of the coding style. Great effort by the author, really good for eight hours' work (as mentioned), and some illuminating conclusions: https://needleful.net/blog/2024/01/arthur_whitney.html#:~:te...
    by svat
  • The way to understand Arthur Whitney's C code is to first learn APL (or, more appropriately, one of his languages in the family). If you skip that part, it'll just look like a weirdo C convention, when really he's trying to write C as if it were APL. The most obvious of the typographic stylings--the lack of spaces, single-character names, and functions on a single line--are how he writes APL too. This is perhaps like being a Pascal programmer coming to C and indignantly starting with "#define begin {" and so forth, except that atw is not a mere mortal like us.
    by electroly
  • They're all macros to make common operations more compact

    I read the J Incunabulum before encountering this, and the point that stands out is that you don't start by jumping into the middle of it like many programmers who are familiar with C will do; the macros defined at the beginning will confuse you otherwise. They also build upon previous ones, so the code ends up climbing the "abstraction ladder" very quickly. I personally like the Iterate macro (i), for how it compresses a relatively verbose loop into a single character; and of course in an array language, the iteration is entirely implicit.

    In other words, I believe the reason this code is hard to read for many who are used to more "normal" C styles is because of its density; in just a few dozen lines, it creates many abstractions and uses them immediately, something which would otherwise be many many pages long in a more normal style. Thus if you try to "skim read" it, you are taking in a significantly higher amount of complexity than usual. It needs to be read one character at a time.

    As someone who has spent considerable time working with huge codebases composed of hundreds of tiny files that have barely any substance to them, and trying to find where things happen becomes an exercise in search, this extreme compactness feels very refreshing.

    by userbinator

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