The Whitney style relies mostly on C macros, while IOCCC (and especially golfed) entries tend to exploit very forgiving operators. It is likely that you can act

The Whitney style relies mostly on C macros, while IOCCC (and especially golfed) entries tend to exploit very forgiving operators. It is likely that you can actually understand the thing with only proper renaming. I can confidently say this because my IOCCC entry had won in the Best Short Program category ;-) I'm still not sure that this terse style in C improves reading. I agree that lots of concise idioms present in APL family of languages do improve reading (once you picked them up), and I do like lots of short functions more than a number of long functions (another contrast to IOCCC, where you don't see many functions). But those languages are tailor made to maximize this aspect. You for example don't think much about loop invariants in APL and friends because they are mostly implicit, and in turn you get very good refactorability. Would it improve other non-array languages? I doubt.