I see you there.
I can see you hiding, beneath all that refactored code and all those unflatteringly optimized routines.
The shape your indents make sends shivers up my spine. Everything is cordoned off, with rows of commented dashes and named, explained sections. The code itself is beauteous, the while loops and function calls each requiring the other, holistically, elegantly. The curly braces nest in myriad ways, but never too far down.
I see you compiling so silently and warninglessly, the compiler reading you, writing you, making you whole, powerful. The fleetness of your execution is unrivaled, the handling of your arguments as perfect as to be intuitive. And as your invocation sends off a spark of API related calls, as your binary turns into a resultation, your commands are read and obeyed faithfully by a minute CPU off in a lovely frozen shelled plate of green and warm and solder. The electric currents ebb and flow, the main CPU of silicon calculating your algorithms.
And oh, the algorithms! The coroutines were a nice touch, for the iterators. And the simplicity of handling of the queues and the stacks you use was pure elegance. The banality of a name like shunting-yard is meant for far less magnificent algorithms than you.
This was an actual dream that occurred to me, one night. A piece of code, personified, somehow, that I once wrote for a daemon-type program I had. It was an implementation of the shunting-yard algorithm, which turned a mathematical expression from infix to Reverse Polish notation, also known as postfix.
As far as vaguely remembered dreams go, this one is exceptionally clear. It took on a myriad shapes and faces, which shifted and changed as it moved, like a voluptuous kaleidoscope. One face was that of a friend from elementary school: she had moved in from Texas, and I had almost thought I'd fallen in love with her once. Another was the pudgy rolls of my grade 8 teacher, who had small eyes and a slight waddle. And more faces that I knew, and even some I didn't.
The body, on the other hand, was a prototypical naked hourglass-figured woman. Or at least, I would say that it looked to be, visually. But in the dream, I felt like I had a different sort of seeing, as well as the normal one. Like I could see all the vibrating, pulsing mosaic bits for what they were, as opposed to simply minute bits of the whole. And they felt like lines of code. So this snippet-amalgamation woman was composed of odd ideas of programs, each trying to refit back into shape with every movement. It was somewhat like how holograms are often portrayed in movies, or how those funky laser light show projectors looked: whenever the picture would step in a certain direction, the cone-like bit stretching from the actual hologram to the device that would always flicker in odd shades of blue, the part that was tracing the picture out.
This dream happened during that period of my life when I finally started understanding the elegance and beauty of mathematics. (It was also when I became a regular masturbator, but I swear, that's not what the dream was about!) I was slowly making the connection to the other places where the math type of beauty could be found, such as in computer science, where, by extension, scraps of that beauty could be seen in coded programs in the same way that scraps of the natural beauty of a cheetah could be seen at a zoo.
As much as I pride myself on being at least eccentric, if not downright nearly-crazy, with respect to non-conformance, but this was definitely one of the weirdest dreams I've had.
[IN12#26]