23 Apr 2000 zw   » (Master)

All the routines in cpp that I haven't gotten around to rewriting (there aren't too many left, thank ghod) look remarkably similar. They are at least five hundred lines long. They have at least ten levels of nested braces. They have at least ten variables that are used all over the entire function, plus at least twenty more declared in the inner blocks. And they have obvious places where they can be broken into smaller functions with ease.

I would like to know who it was wrote all the functions like that. They're not just in the preprocessor. They're everywhere in gcc. I mean, everywhere. And it's not like a monster function gets optimized better than four reasonable ones; in fact, just the opposite. Nor is it easier to debug a monster function, or profile it. And it is certainly not easier to edit it. So someone must have been absolutely in love with the things. And I want to know who, and why.

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