[svat]

See the line “The tables look a little uncouth at first but it is not hard to figure out what is going on”: this blog post is about the author's thought process in figuring out what is going on, carrying the reader along: such a figuring-out will often be messier, with occasional wrong turns, than presenting the end of the process as a fait accompli, but it can be more illuminating (like Euler's writing rather than Gauss's who was accused of being “like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail”). I wouldn't call it obfuscating.

But ah +1, I see what you mean. I must confess I had only skimmed both articles earlier, but having thought about it now, While the blog post treats Table1 as a trivial consequence and reverse-engineers Table2, it is cleaner to do it the other way around (treating T2 as a consequence of T1 and reverse-engineering T1). I have done so, and ended up actually writing the “explain from scratch how to come up with that code” blog post: https://shreevatsa.net/post/irish-logarithm/ — and only after writing it out myself do I understand what Coghlan was getting at :) This is also basically what the posted blog post has BTW — it's not really any harder; it's just that it's hard to follow someone else's reasoning in text while it would be easier at a blackboard with pictures and gestures.

[mjd]

Thanks very much for the followup article! I suspected that sksksnrpny was correct, and that the direct forward construction given in the paper they referred to would be simpler than the ad-hoc backtracking search I did. But I needed to work through an example to be sure, and now I don't have to because you've done it for me.

Also I'm delighted that you remembered that Matthew P. Wiener thing from 30 years ago.