Re: pattern equality test?

From: Arthur J. O'Dwyer (ajo_at_nospam.andrew.cmu.edu)
Date: 03/19/04 

Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 20:36:12 -0500 (EST)

On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, Michael Mendelsohn wrote:
>
> "Arthur J. O'Dwyer" schrieb:
> >
> > I was going to post code, but when I started writing the code was
> > when I found the bugs in my algorithm. And now that I've clarified
> > the algorithm, the code is trivial enough to make it not worth my
> > while. ;-)
>
> Personally, I like explanations of algorithms better than unexplained
> code (which is likely not what you intended to do, but I've been
> thinking about this, and you gave me the opportunity to say it). I
> realize this is not comp.explanations, but rather comp.programming, but
> after all it's supposed to be neither language nor OS-specific, and some
> C code that gets posted is pretty language specific (using array index
> -1, for example)...

  That's not specific to C -- it's not even part of C! :) I agree with
you that explanations are usually more useful to a wider audience, and
more fun to read; but it's easier to test a piece of C code than a
paragraph of English. ;-) Also, code is less ambiguous than English.
If I'd just dumped two pages of C code on the newsgroup, instead of
my algorithm in English, you wouldn't have needed me to clarify what I
meant by two prefixes' "matching," for example.

-Arthur

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