... it is a fundamental principle of testing that you must know in advance the answer each test case is supposed to produce. If you don't, you are not testing; you are experimenting.

Trivia rarely affect efficiency. Are all the machinations worth it, when their primary effect is to make the code less readable?

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

An effective way to test code is to exercise it at its natural boundaries

C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

90% of the functionality delivered now is better than 100% delivered never.

Get the weirdnesses into the data where you can manipulate them easily, and the regularity into the code because regular code is a lot easier to work with