Of that there can be no doubt. Neither is self-documenting as early authors about these language claimed. In fact, no programming language is so readily understandable to an outside reviewer that thorough in-line and supplementary documentation is not necessary.



In my case, at least, I simply have trouble seeing the open brace/close brace characters. It's probably just the particular fonts that cause this. I know what the characters mean. It wouldn't hurt anything to use the words, however, not only because they're easy to see, but because one can use an editor to interchange them. Nobody would actually do that, but it's conceivable. The use of single characters in place of what otherwise might be words is one feature that might cause one to see 'C' as being "cryptic". One has to go no further than the classic "Hello World" example to see that.

I don't believe that the substitution of words for "cryptic" symbols, offers any potential improvement. One has merely to learn the language to understand its syntax, after all. That doesn't go very far toward making code understandable. Only well-thought-out comments will do that, and it matters not whether it's Pascal, 'C', ADA, or whatever.

The general issue, with all languages with which I'm familiar is not so much writing code such that the computer understands what's intended, but, rather, so a human reading the code at a later date will understand it.

RE