I like conciseness. Syntactic sugar increases the amount of code I can fit on a single screen, which increases the amount of code I can read without scrolling. Eye saccades are a hell of a lot faster than keyboard scrolling, so not having to scroll is a good thing. However, I recently realized that simple absolute size is actually the wrong metric with which to judge language verbosity, or at least not the most important one.

Something just occurred to me about the gcc implementation of std::vector in C++. Internally, an instance of vector needs to store (1) a pointer to the start of the memory, (2) the current vector size, and (3) the current buffer size. However, (2) and (3) can be represented either as integers relative to the start pointer or as absolute pointers past the end of the active and buffer spaces. Specifically, the two representations are