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"The point of publishing a method is so it can be critiqued; I think the same should hold with source code. " Except that source code can sometimes obfuscate t
by jonhendry 15y ago
"The point of publishing a method is so it can be critiqued; I think the same should hold with source code. "
Except that source code can sometimes obfuscate the intent.
It's probably better to provide pseudocode. Don't provide source code for your binary sort, say you sorted the data and say on what it was sorted, and let other people use their own preferred sort implementation.
Especially since other labs may not use the same equipment, libraries, languages, etc, so source code may be useless.
- bo1024 15y agoI definitely think it would be great to require/expect pseudocode. I'm not sure if it would be better or worse than providing the original code (hey, why not both?), but it would be a very good standard to adopt.
- rflrob 15y ago"Except that source code can sometimes obfuscate the intent." The source code, no matter how opaque and poorly written, can never really make things less clear. That's because it must be able to be interpreted by a computer. Good pseudocode and high level descriptions can help illuminate the code, but, as the saying goes, "If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong."