CITS2002 Systems Programming  
← prev
next → CITS2002 CITS2002 schedule  

The unreadability of C programs

C is described as nothing more than a glorified assembly language, meaning that C programs can be written in such an unreadable fashion that they look like your monitor is set at the wrong speed.

(in fact there's a humorous contest held each year, The International Obfuscated C Code Contest to design fully working but indecipherable code,
and the (defunct) Underhanded C Contest whose goal is to write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function).

Perhaps C's biggest problem is that the language was designed by programmers who, folklore says, were not very proficient typists.

C makes extensive use of punctuation characters in the syntax of its operators and control flow. In fact, only the punctuation characters

@  `  and  $

are not used in C's syntax! (and DEC-C once used the $ character, and Objective-C now uses the @).

It is not surprising, then, that if C programs are not formatted both consistently and with sufficient white space between operators, and if very short identifier names are used, a C program will be very difficult to read.

To partially address these problems, a number of text-editors, integrated development environments (IDEs), and beautification programs (such as indent) can automatically reformat our C code according to consistent specifications.

 

CITS2002 Systems Programming, Lecture 1, p9, 22nd July 2024.