On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 9:14 AM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu> wrote: 
 
But, not important.  A real change to my coding style came when
i looked around Plan9 source code, the pragmatism to simply not
use spaces in language constructs aka statements at all, for
example "if(a){" instead of "if(a) {" or "if (a) {", and let alone
"if (a)\nALIGN{\nALIGN" and whatever else. 

That way lies APL madness.  To exemplify, Kona is an open-source interpreter for Arthur Whitney's K version 3 language, which is closely related to APL, but crams almost all of the APL operators onto single ASCII characters with massive overloading.  For example, monadic ! is APL "iota", but dyadic ! is "modulo" if both arguments are numbers and "rotate" if the right argument is a number and the left argument is a vector.  What any of these has to do with the rest is beyond me: I had to create a set of flash cards to help me learn them all.

Well, here's a procedure definition from the Kona source, in a file helpfully named kc.c (almost all of the source files have 1-2 character names):

I wds_(K*a,FILE*f,I l)
{ S s=0,t=0;  I b=0,c=0,m=0,n=0,v=0;  K z=0; PDA p=0;
  I o=isatty(STDIN)&&f==stdin;
  if(-1==(c=getline_(&s,&n,f)))GC;
  appender(&t,&m,s,n);
  while(1==(v=complete(t,m,&p,0)))
  { b=parsedepth(p);
    if(o)prompt(b+l);
    if(-1==(c=getline_(&s,&n,f)))GC;
    appender(&t,&m,s,n); }
  SW(v){CS(2,show(kerr("unmatched"));GC) CS(3,show(kerr("nest")); GC)}
  z=newK(-3,m-1);
  strncpy(kC(z),t,m-1);
 cleanup:
  free(s); free(t);
  if(p)pdafree(p);
  if((v||c==-1)&&z){cd(z); *a=0;}
  else *a=z;
  R v?-v:c; }    // -1 EOF, -2 unmatched, -3 nest

If you want that sort of thing, you can certainly have it.  Note the single-space ident and the cuddled right braces.  Note also the label "cleanup:"; presumably a "goto cleanup;" is hidden somewhere in the single-letter (of course) macros.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
The peculiar excellence of comedy is its excellent fooling, and Aristophanes's
claim to immortality is based upon one title only: he was a master maker
of comedy, he could fool excellently.  Here Gilbert stands side by side
with him.  He, too, could write the most admirable nonsense.  There has
never been better fooling than his, and a comparison with him carries
nothing derogatory to the great Athenian. --Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way