On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 08:56:55AM -0500, Douglas Tutty wrote: > On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 10:26:53PM -0600, Russell L. Harris wrote: > > Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > > >On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 01:34:30PM -0800, Steve Lamb wrote: > > >> Depends on what you define as elegant. > > > > > >when I was learning to program (mid 80's), we considered anything > > >outside of brute force to be elegant. Also, anything non-obvious was > > >also considered elegant. Anything that used a side-effect was NOT > > >considered elegant because you couldn't tell from reading the code > > >what it was actually doing (one reason I struggle with C). > > > > > >The idea was to be short, sweet, not-brute-forced, and caused one to > > >say "ah ha!" after a couple read throughs. > > > > > > > > The ultimate in elegance is Forth. And the ultimate in Forth, circa > > 1980, was polyForth. > > Can you give us an example of Forth, preferably that would do the string > parse here? I did a little Forth but remember none except that you started with a small handful of defined words and a RPN math system and built up keywords so that the final result to parse this file we've been discussing would be something like: (parse IN) and that is the ultimate in elegance ;-0 A
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