Instead of just gazing at the sea of terse variable names in awe, try actually reading it! There's only about a dozen variables and they're all documented at th

Instead of just gazing at the sea of terse variable names in awe, try actually reading it! There's only about a dozen variables and they're all documented at the top - the actual code is actually amazingly clear for what it does. There's not a lot of gratuitous cleverness. For example, just picking a random segment, you don't have to squint very hard to see that this is a number literal parser: else if (tk >= '0' && tk <= '9') { if (ival = tk - '0') { while (*p >= '0' && *p <= '9') ival = ival * 10 + *p++ - '0'; } else if (*p == 'x' || *p == 'X') { [...goes on to handle the hexadecimal case...] (aside - I love the conversion from string to decimal by subtracting the string value of '0', as this will work for any text encoding where the decimal digits are monotonic and contiguous - so ASCII and EBDIC at least...)