Teaching Programming

[Terry Reedy]

On 5/5/2010 4:50 AM, Dave Angel wrote:
> alex23 wrote:
>> Ed Keith <e_... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> Knuth wanted the generated source to be unreadable, so people would
>>> not be tempted to edit the generated code.
>>
>> This is my biggest issue with Knuth's view of literate programming. If
>> the generated source isn't readable, am I just supposed to trust it?
>> How can I tell if an error lies in my expression of the algorithm or
>> in the code generation itself?
>>
> Do you think a compiler is required to make its object file conveniently
> readable? Do you regularly read the machine code generated by your C
> compiler? I admit I've frequently studied compiler output over the
> years, but I think I'm very unusual in that respect. I've never
> disassembled a python byte code file,

The output from dis.dis() is quite readable, and people (developers and 
others) have used it to check on what the compiler is doing.