If he's smart, he makes his code totally transparent. That's very difficult to do in 'C'.

If his code is hard to read it's because he's floundering about and doesn't know how to do what he thinks he wants, and, perhaps, because he doesn't even know what that is.

Code, whether 'C' or HDL, that's written by a person who fully understands what he's supposed to accomplish and what THIS block of code is supposed to accomplish, will be clear, concise, and easy to understand if one understands what the task is. It's up to the external documentation and internal comments to make all that clear.

I'm not convinced there's any benefit in attempting to obfuscate an algorithm, however secret, within a set of code that will, ultimately, have to be used by someone else.

RE