Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Parsing timestamps?
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:12:41 -0700
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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Message-ID: <87zfdvyo0m.fsf@nightsong.com>
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dxf <dxforth@gmail.com> writes:
> Define 'unreadable'.  In general I don't need to understand the nitty
> gritty of a routine.  But should I and no stack commentary exists, I've
> no objections to creating it.  It's par for the course in Forth.  If it
> bugged me I wouldn't be doing Forth.

Unreadable = I look at the code and have no idea what it's doing.  The
logic is often obscured by stack manipulation.  The values in the stack
are meaningful to the program's operation, but what is the meaning?  In
most languages, meaningful values have names, and the names convey the
meaning.  In Forth, you can write comments for that purpose.  Years
after cmForth was published, someone wrote a set of shadow screens for
it, and that helped a lot.

With no named values and no explanatory comments, the program becomes
opaque.