
"I was really excited to write this article, because it gave me an excuse to really think about what beautiful code is. I still don't think I know, and maybe it's entirely subjective. I do think the two biggest things, for me at least, are stylistic indenting and maximum const-ness. A lot of the stylistic choices are definitely my personal preferences, and I'm sure other programmers will have different opinions. I think the choice of what style to use is up to whoever has to read and write the code, but I certainly think it's something worth thinking about. I would suggest everyone look at the Doom 3 source code
because I think it exemplifies beautiful code, as a complete package: from system design down to how to tab space the characters." John Carmack himself
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Member since:
2011-01-28
OzzyLondon,
"a = a + 1 = a.operator+( T other )
a++ = a.operator++( int )
++a = a.operator++()
Three completely different function calls"
You are absolutely correct. And the post-increment operator highlights a C++ syntactic hack in and of itself. Personally I'm a bit disappointed that the language designers reverted to such an ugly hack (passing in unused int parameter to distinguish between functions).