OT, but that&#x27;s one reason comments are important. Also in the alternative hypothetical where reading a byte at a time was required: if that&#x27;s not documented someone might come along and thing that was merely <i>incidental</i> or even buggy behavior and change it. That&#x27;s why I&#x27;m not sympathetic to programmers who think that they write &quot;self-documenting&quot; code or something. If you don&#x27;t document (even briefly) what your code is <i>supposed to do</i> then bugs become diffuse things that no one is responsible for, and which are difficult to spot. &lt;&#x2F;ramble&gt;