But the actual meaning of the program is still lost on me. I can only guess it has something to do with parsing files (note the checks for curly braces). Feeding it its own source code produces some output, but I have no idea what it actually modified.
Guess I could have just looked at the URL, huh. Well, it was fun trying to reverse Whitney's code anyhow.
Humorously, it looks like this code would have received a poor grade. It meets just about every standard for low quality outlined here: http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs107/landmarks.html, particularly "Fast code which doesn't work quite right." (Due to an off-by-one error, this code fails to properly reconstruct the example text.)
I believe the audience is developers using K in a commercial/production environment.
The biggest differences, compared to Arthur's style of writing, are:
* Less code on each line
* A separate comment column on each line
* Nominal use of spaces for readability
I was more referring to the almost exclusive use of single letter variable names. If one would use at least short words to name things, the implementation would be a whole lot more understandable.
But the actual meaning of the program is still lost on me. I can only guess it has something to do with parsing files (note the checks for curly braces). Feeding it its own source code produces some output, but I have no idea what it actually modified.