compact: adj. 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).
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