> > As a Pascal programmer, I was taught that anything that makes the program
> > more readable is good. This does not seem to qualify on that count. What's
> > more, it seems to muddle the entire while loop by mixing assignment and
> > increment with the test portion.
>
> I agree with you completely.  Just because you CAN do something in C in one
> line doesn't mean you should.  The biggest long term cost of software is
> maintenance, so most of the code should be optimized for clarity and to
> reduce the chance someone might overlook a detail.  Most of this comes at no
> cost in cycles or code space because the compiler rearranges things
> internally into sequential operations anyway.  It's just a matter of laying
> out the source code in an easy to follow manner, and of course including
> good comments.

So would you be as comfortable with one line of cryptic-looking code with
five lines of comments explaining it, or five lines of perfectly clear
code with one line of comments?  Or five and five?  Personally I tend
toward the first:

void strcpy (char *s, char *t) {
     // This will copy from *t into *s, incrementing each
     // pointer and looping until a null is encountered in
     // *t.  Once we see a null, *s = *t evaluates to 0
     // and the while loop ends.
     while (*s++ = *t++);
}

I tend to do it that way for a couple of reasons -- first, since I still
consider myself to be something of a novice C programmer, I like to go
through my code a few times to see if I can optimize it further before the
compiler gets to it.  Second, it leaves enough bread crumbs behind that
when I look at it later on I can remember what I did and why.  That's nice
no matter how many lines you use to do the same thing.

Of course, to be more accurate in this particular case I should say I
*would* do it that way if I were clever enough to have squeezed it down
that far int he first place.  I doubt I would have figured out how to make
it *that* concise.

Dale

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