C4 – C in 4 functions

I honestly think this is ridiculous. Sure, this is an incredible feat, and congrats. But serioulsy, I would be ashamed to publish such unreadable code under my name.

What about naming your variables with descriptive names?

What about extracting complex conditions into well named function to understand what is going on (thus defeating the purpose of the "4 functions") ?

This list could go on forever...

Writing software is not a contest for who can write the most amount of code in the most cryptic way.

The variable names thing really annoyed me too - a habit of code golf, and people who were originally trained in an old FORTRAN edition that had a 6 or 7 char limit on names.

I used to rather long names too... but now I think short variables have their place, and sometimes they even improve readability.

This code seems to follow a lot of conventions (if I see the var "i" I could bet a million dollars is an int that is being used as a counter, probably to go through the positions of an array). It uses plenty of enumerated constants, which is good too.

I've been doing some functional programming, where you find that often types are more important than names. See the "Names are overrated" section of this article [1] ( although this point may not apply to this piece of software... C being the language that it is :p).

1: http://techblog.realestate.com.au/the-abject-failure-of-weak...