Its hard to put a clear hierarchy of importance since it's a rather fine balance. As you say going for maximum compactness makes it much less understandable (Re

Its hard to put a clear hierarchy of importance since it's a rather fine balance. As you say going for maximum compactness makes it much less understandable (Regex anyone?). That's also why i used the term entropy rather than compactness. It's not primarily the number of characters we're optimizing for but code as information dense and devoid of redundancies as possible. I actually think you should be verbose to the point of building a DSL-like syntax for your solution to improve readability. Even for instance addint small properties and methods that simplifies reading. It's much easier to read if (CanWrite && WillFitDisk) than if (File.Position != File.EOF && Disk.AvailableSpace > Buffer.Size) Even if reusability of those small methods and properties aren't high So I see it as "compact" as possible as long as you fulfill understandability and maintainability.