Of a design, describes the valuable property
that it can all be apprehended at once in one's head. This
generally means the thing created from the design can be used with
greater facility and fewer errors than an equivalent tool that is
not compact. Compactness does not imply triviality or lack of
power; for example, C is compact and FORTRAN is not, but C is more
powerful than FORTRAN. Designs become non-compact through
accreting features and cruft that don't merge cleanly
into the overall design scheme (thus, some fans of Classic C
maintain that ANSI C is no longer compact).
C++ /C'-pluhs-pluhs/ n.
Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup
of AT& T Bell Labs as a successor to C. Now one of the
languages of choice, although many hackers still grumble that
it is the successor to either Algol 68 or Ada (depending on
generation), and a prime example of second-system effect....
