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by phpnode 3829 days ago
It's idiomatic style in the K community, e.g. here's a random source file from kdb itself - http://code.kx.com/wsvn/code/kx/kdb%2B/c/c/odbc.c

Some members of that community prefer this style because they find it more readable.

1 comments

Some people like to have big monitors so that they can fit more code on their screen at once. Instead of getting a bigger screen why not shrink the code?

As a side project I implemented a small text editor in this style. I had a working text editor with the ability to load a file, insert and delete text, scroll around a large file, and save changes. It fit within about 100 lines of concise (but I wouldn't say obfuscated) C.

In the end I decided to reformat it and use my usual style before implementing more features. But it was a good experiment and I now understand the appeal of the ultra-condensed style you see in J, K, some Forth, and some Perl code.