I'm kind of a 'why not what' kind of guy when it comes to comments. For example "powerTicks < 10" took much less time for my brain to parse (and I get extra information, I see there is a variable called powerTicks then "/* ...has no powerup or powerup expires in less than 10 "ticks" */" did. Then my eyes had to scan for the closing comment to get to the important part.
Parsing has been used to describe the human activity of puzzling out meaning from a string of symbols for longer than electronic computers have been around.
Yeah, I do not know why OP would imply that. The brain does actually parse. In terms of language processing, the term "parse" may refer to the mental process of syntactic analysis, in which case the brain analyzes the grammatical structure of a sentence to comprehend its meaning. Besides that, there is auditory parsing of sound patterns, along with visual parsing of visual scenes to recognize objects, shapes, and patterns.
Sure, the brain does not follow the same principles of formal grammars used in computer science, but I think the term "parsing" still applies.
