Of Bounties and Mercenaries

[Toon Moene]

Stephan T. Lavavej wrote:

> Recently I was discussing with some friends how to implement Huffman
> compression.  When a Huffman tree is being constructed, "available" nodes
> are kept in a pile, and nodes with the lowest weight must be repeatedly
> removed, while new nodes are inserted.
> 
> After a bit of thinking, we arrived at this:
> 
> std::priority_queue<Node *, std::vector<Node *>, boost::function<bool (Node
> *, Node *)> >
> available_nodes(*_1 > *_2);
> 
> Now, that's certainly... subtle, but it simplifies greatly the following
> code.

[ Sorry coming into this debate four days late ]

I didn't even parse this code, though I have "Accelerated C++" by Koenig 
& Moo - I was hit by the obvious: the adjective "subtle".

I have worked on too many programming projects with multiple 
contributors over the last 20 years, and the one thing you *do not want 
to have* is subtility.

Everything in the code has to be blatantly obvious, or else one of your 
coworkers is going to misinterpret it.

No amount of commenting is going to offset that.

-- 
Toon Moene - mailto:toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl - phoneto: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
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GNU Fortran 95: http://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/ (under construction)