From slarti@gallifrey.3d.gweep.net Sun Dec 5 15:33:22 1999 Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1999 15:33:22 -0500 From: Chris Pinard To: void@slab.org Subject: Re: (void) unabomber browser Message-ID: <19991205153322.F21442@gallifrey.3d.gweep.net> Mail-Followup-To: void@slab.org References: <19991205201309.E2644@tightrope.demon.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: <19991205201309.E2644@tightrope.demon.co.uk>; from Steve Mynott on Sun, Dec 05, 1999 at 08:13:09PM +0000 Status: RO Content-Length: 1862 Lines: 38 On Sun, Dec 05, 1999 at 08:13:09PM +0000, Steve Mynott wrote: > http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/ > similar to lynx with minimal (w3m like) table browsing > very fast - draws page as it transfers Yeah, it runs pretty nice. But the code is shit. I've been working on patching it to provide SSL support, and whenever I try to work out how some part of it works, I find myself contemplating the nearest spoon's ability to scoop out my eyes as a way to temporarily relieve the near-explosive pressure building up in my brain. Nothing does its job even remotely on its own. It calls subfunctions, which call subfunctions, which etc. etc... And has these weird queue and threadedness implementations that make program flow something like the odd non-Euclidean tunnels you'd expect to find under Miskatonic University. It's like the author wrote it as a bunch of spaghetti code, and then, rather than untangle the spaghetti and make it something a bit more intelligible, took a fork and knife, sliced through the knot of code a bunch and mixed up the bits, so that by the end, you get something that may still be pretty darn tasty (as I said, it does run quite nicely), but which looks like a pasty mish-mash which makes it difficult, at best, to follow the trail of any one strand of the spaghetti. Oh, and it's completely uncommented and undocumented. I've been losing and recovering SAN off and on throughout the last few days 'cause of this thing. My only consolation is that I think I might be getting close to done. But I don't know for sure. Slarti Who thought that lynx's code was pretty badly all over the place, until he took his first look at this stuff. Lynx is a paragon of structured programming by comparison... -- Chris Pinard: Just zis guy, ya know? -- slarti@gallifrey.3d.gweep.net Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here?