4 ms·

Claiming something is not beautiful because it is "hacky" on HN is a bit unexpected. For me this is beautiful: https://briancallahan.net/blog/20220220.html ht

• int_19h 5y ago
  "Hacked together" can mean different things. In this case, it means something slapped together on short notice with limited resources. Such things rarely tend to be beautiful. Beautiful hacks absolutely exist, but they are never hacked together in this sense. The only thing your blog post demonstrates is that C has a built-in textual macro facility. But if you wanted the same in Pascal, you could have it just the same, by running it through the C preprocessor; or better yet, something more powerful like M4. Of course, you'd have to deal with various impedance mismatches, such as the fact that the definition of "token" is different between the preprocessor and the compiler - but that's also true of C! In fact, this discrepancy alone is quite sufficient to deem C inelegant, in my opinion.