phdaemon and public domain software

[Robert Rodriguez]

I'm all for the concept of public domain software maintenance, but in
defense of Lee Hounshell, I'd like to bring up a small point.

In the original flame of Lee by I forget whom, stated:

>[Lee] did a complete re-write and changed the coding sytle of
>the program, although I don't know why!

I know why!  Seventy five percent of the code that comes over
the public domain is almost un-readable.  Isn't cb(1) available
on all UNIX(tm) releases ?  I know less than half of the people
who get PD software hack on the code, but it's not easy to look
at some of the stuff that I receive.  Don't get me wrong, I app-
reciate PD software, and I actually sometimes enjoy changing code
to my style preference before I store it, but I'm only trying to
answer the flamer as to why Lee changed the coding sytle.


Consider the following (taken from a public domain chess game):

  if (color[t]!=neutral)
  {
    node->flags |= capture;
    if (t==xkillr) s +=400;
    if (atak[xside][t]==0) s += value[board[t]]-board[f];
    else if (board[t]>board[f]) s += value[board[t]]-value[board[f]];
    else s +=15;
  }

How about this:

	if(color[t] != neutral) {

		node->flags |= capture;

		if(t == xkillr)
			s += 400;

		if(atak[xside][t] == 0)
			s += value[board[t]] - board[f];
		else if(board[t] > board[f])
			s += value[board[t]] - value[board[f]];
		else
			s += 15;
	}

I prefer the latter.  Again, I'd like to say that I'm not saying
everyone should either conform to the rules or die, I'm just
saying that Lee probably re-wrote some of the code to make it
more readable.

These opinions are my own and are not those of Pacific Bell.

(Although my boss would be pissed if I wrote code like the first example)

Robert Rodriguez
ESAC, Pacific [*] Bell
pacbell!pttesac!robert
(213) 604-5175