Re: size_t vs long.

[Alejandro Colomar via Libc-alpha <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>]

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Hi Jason,

On 11/17/22 20:40, Jason Duerstock wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 17, 2022 at 6:01 AM Alejandro Colomar via Libc-alpha
> <libc-alpha@sourceware.org> wrote:
>>
>> Not really.  I was trying to be explicative, while being a bit funny, to make it
>> more entertaining to read.  But as Brian Kernighan said, noone is smart enough
>> to debug its own code:
>>
>> [
>> Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if
>> you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart
>> enough to debug it.
>> ]
>>           — Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger in The Elements of Programming
>> Style.
> 
> Not to get too far off topic, but I took this to mean that one should
> endeavor to be boring and straightforward when coding unless it was
> absolutely necessary to be clever, as the boring and straightforward
> code would be easier to debug.

Yes, that a valid reading of it.

My extended reading of it is:

-  Code is hard to debug by yourself; keep it simple (your point, I think).
-  If you write more complex code trying to debug your own code, you are by 
necessity violating the previous point.
-  If you went ahead and wrote code to debug your own code, will you go further 
to write code that debugs the debugging code?
-  The algorithm crashed.  :)

> 
> Or at the very least, one should never be more than 50% clever about it.
> 
> Jason

Cheers,

Alex

-- 
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>

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