How does this compile

lewitt - clean

Executing Sol Lewitt’s artwork was mostly a challenge not because of the instructions themselves, but the way the instructions were presented. In all the computer science classes I’ve taken, they always remind students that they should write code for people to read – not for machines to execute. The strict ‘style’ rules about line length, proper indentation, and commenting code is a clear indicator of how seriously they want students to follow this philosophy. As in the case of Lewitt’s instructions the audience can be interpreted as both the person and machine, it becomes very challenging to execute because of the drawn-out line length (it certainly does not follow the standard ‘at most 80 characters per line’ protocol), lack of punctuation, and abundance of connectives. For me, it became confusing to the point that I had to annotate the instructions to keep track of key points, positions, and the like.

lewitt-instructions - annotated

 

My first attempt was pretty heavily annotated:

lewitt - rough

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