There's a sense of "unreadable" that I sometimes use that means "the code does not contain the information that you need to understand how it will typically fun

There's a sense of "unreadable" that I sometimes use that means "the code does not contain the information that you need to understand how it will typically function". E.g. things that have internal control flow determined by complex input processing where the input is ill-specified. It can be essentially impossible to put together a mental picture of the operation of the program, because key parts are essentially unspecified. And there's a related sense that I occasionally use to describe code that's so difficult to follow (in the sense that the control flow or structure is needless obfuscated) that the process of trying to understand it doesn't really resemble simply "reading". Some examples: A function is called in many places in es6 code. I want to see its definition, my editor can't figure it out. I look at the import statement, it's imported from a file. I open that file, and all it does is export * from a dozen other files - so now all I know is that it's in one of these dozen files. I am reduced to doing something like grepping for the function name and looking for the case that looks more like a definition than a call. At one point I was reading the code, now I'm doing something related and more involved than just reading. Or, in this system components emit message objects with a "title" field. The messages are dispatched to dozens of functions across files that inspect the title field to determine if they do anything with it. Only they don't just do a simple comparison against a string literal, they check if the title meets a regex. There are many of these different regexes. I read the code that emits the message and I want to know what behaviors the message being sent out triggers - how do I track that down? I can't even grep for the message title. In order to make a list of things this message might do, I have to look through everything that might possibly handle the message and try to figure out which regexes are triggered. In this case, reading is involved in the same way that reading through a math book and solving the exercises does involve reading - that's not where most of the work comes from.