Edward Bartolo <edbarx@???> wrote:

> At first, I was tempted to follow the path of writing obfuscated code,
> but thinking about it, with todays huge computers, it simple doesn't
> make sense to write difficult to read code. In the past there was an
> advantage of writing such code that saved on code size as RAM size was
> only a few kilobytes but definitely not today.

I suspect that a good compiler will produce much the same from terse code as from verbose code. As already said, the obfuscated code contest is a challenge and most definitely not an example of how real code should be written.

Writing legible code should be a matter of pride. There may be debate about what constitutes "legible", but unless you are aspiring to be one of those "coders from hell" who writes code that no-one else (including yourself a couple of years down the line) can maintain, legible should be what you aspire to.

I suspect few of us haven't been in a situation where we're sat there wondering what the heck we were thinking when we wrote that code <some period of time> ago.