Ask Slashdot: What Do You Consider Elegant Code?

lxrslh writes: "Since the dawn of computing, we have read about massive failed projects, bugs that are never fixed, security leaks, spaghetti code, and other flaws in the programs we use every day to operate the devices and systems upon which we depend. It would be interesting to read the code of a well-engineered, perfectly coded, intellectually challenging program. I would love to see the code running in handheld GPS units that first find a variable number of satellites and then calculate the latitude, longitude, and elevation of the unit. Do you have an example of a compact and elegant program for which the code is publicly available?"

Re:Duff's Device

[DpEpsilon]

When numerous instances of Duff's device were removed from the XFree86 Server in version 4.0, there was an improvement in performance

Personally, I blame the compiler for failing to optimize properly.

The pinnacle of elegant code

[igomaniac]

http://www.ioccc.org/ [ioccc.org]

Re:GPS? Are you kidding?

[exploder]

As someone who got lost somewhere deep in a single sentence (which consumed three whole screen-width lines) that spent nearly 100 words on a dependent clause (which itself contained two parenthetical clauses) before even getting to the subject (I was starting to wonder if there would be one at all) I question the value of your comments on the topic of elegance...