C51 Toolchain under Visual Studio IDE

I believe it assumes you are lazy and do not make variables meaningful when you use them.
IE it assumes 'you' do this

void fnc_me(unsigned char e)
{
int i;
i = 0;
for(;i < e; i++) { if(i & 1) { s_pf("%X", i);} else { s_pf("%03d", i); } }
}

In other words you obfuscate everything to loose all meaning because you are too lazy to actually write coherent code (this could be a Microsoft internal problem).

And when you need to change a routine you just recycle the variable over and over each time. So no meaning is attached to any of your code. You also don't comment etc.

Basically it makes that assumption.

It's mostly helpful when you get another project that you can't make heads or tails of (and was written like my obfuscated example I guess) and you need to change it or update it significantly.

Stephen

I believe it assumes you are lazy and do not make variables meaningful when you use them.
IE it assumes 'you' do this

void fnc_me(unsigned char e)
{
int i;
i = 0;
for(;i < e; i++) { if(i & 1) { s_pf("%X", i);} else { s_pf("%03d", i); } }
}

In other words you obfuscate everything to loose all meaning because you are too lazy to actually write coherent code (this could be a Microsoft internal problem).

And when you need to change a routine you just recycle the variable over and over each time. So no meaning is attached to any of your code. You also don't comment etc.

Basically it makes that assumption.

It's mostly helpful when you get another project that you can't make heads or tails of (and was written like my obfuscated example I guess) and you need to change it or update it significantly.

Stephen

But, if the meaning is lost (or was never there in the first place), how can any automatic process (re-)create it?!

Isn't that just like trying to re-create 'C' source code from hex?

The automatic tools can at least allow you to rename the meaningless 'i' variable into something more describing, without accidentally touching several hundred other 'i' variables in the program.

So automatic tools helps out when the initial developer has been lazy.

If the initial variables already have 10-15 characters, then the number of clashes are few, in which case it will often be enough to do a recursive grep to find that a replace all is safe.