I'm voting for readability, in agreement with Dr Conway. Frequently, code maintenance is assigned to the programmers with the least experience in a language, so terseness is not clever. I've been handed code to maintain in COBOL and PL/1, never having worked in either, and I had never even read a book about COBOL before.

Information about American English usage here and here. Floating point issues? Please read this before posting. — emc

In reply to Re: Clever vs. Readable by swampyankee
in thread Clever vs. Readable by Anonymous Monk

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