explicit syntax for accessing class members and globals

[Steve Horne]

On Wed, 06 Sep 2006 14:19:32 +0300, Serg Kovrov <kovrov at no.spam>
wrote:

>If you understand from this example (and i'm sure you are) what scope 
>this identifiers belong to, you could see how this restrictions make 
>much harder to foil a reader even on purpose.

Readability is always, in the end, the responsibility of the
programmer. There are always more ways to write unreadable code than
to write readable code.

Despite all the style guides and the efforts to impose readability by
authoritarian standards, there is no simple set of rules for what is
or is not readable. Every style guide ever written can be ridiculed by
simply finding the right example and working to rule.

Readability is inherently subjective, by which I mean context
sensitive much more than I mean a matter of personal judgement. Many
different factors affect the readability of any single piece of code,
and some of those factors will always be in conflict.

For instance, a more explicit style can certainly make code clearer.
But it can also make code more cluttered, obscuring what is important
by burying it under tonnes of trivial details. This is why high level
languages were invented in the first place.

And so programming language designers have to make choices - what
should be explicit and what should be implicit, what should be
enforced and what should not. Sometimes there are overwhelming reasons
for going one way or the other. And sometimes, it really comes down to
subjectivity, in the sense of personal taste.

That's why I'm sticking to my guns. There's nothing wrong with your
opinion, and it works well enough in those languages where it is used,
but it isn't any kind of absolute. And I want my existing code to
still work tomorrow, whatever language it is written in.

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