Re: Term for elegant, efficient, tight code?

["Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Karen E. Black wrote:
> A cow-orker asked me for a term to describe code with 
> correct syntax, implicit instead of explicit cursors, 
> correct open and close statements. It's for a procedures
> doc heading.

One word won't do; there are several competing concepts here:

> code with correct syntax...correct open and close statements

This just means that the code compiles or parses correctly, but it
could still be awful code. Try "valid." 

> implicit instead of explicit cursors

Your developers may have perfectly good technical reasons to use both
or neither. If your standards say to use implicit cursors, try
"standard." 

> elegant, efficient, tight code

This is a matter of heuristics and taste. There are lots of holy wars
about what makes code tight. 

In Perl, for example, it's possible to leverage the syntax to such an
extent that the program is packed tight but is barely human-readable;
this is usually not considered good practice. For example, I've seen
the DeCSS program written in about 5 lines of Perl. But I didn't
understand one character of it (don't worry Eric, I won't post a link).


Mike O.

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