I think his comment about IMP might apply to a few of the terser modern languages (emphasis mine): "The second thing about IMP was that it was an extremely ter

I think his comment about IMP might apply to a few of the terser modern languages (emphasis mine): "The second thing about IMP was that it was an extremely terse language. For example, where in PASCAL you would say "IF X > 0 THEN...", in IMP you say "X+=>". In other words, your program was very short. You felt like you were writing elegant programs, because there were only a few characters, but you couldn't read them the next day! Being very terse meant that you couldn't fathom this bunch of marks on the page..."