The Weird and The Wonderful

   

The Weird and The Wonderful forum is a place to post Coding Horrors, Worst Practices, and the occasional flash of brilliance.

We all come across code that simply boggles the mind. Lazy kludges, embarrassing mistakes, horrid workarounds and developers just not quite getting it. And then somedays we come across - or write - the truly sublime.

Post your Best, your worst, and your most interesting. But please - no programming questions . This forum is purely for amusement and discussions on code snippets. All actual programming questions will be removed.

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Re: Nice usage of foreach Rob Grainger24-Feb-09 3:06 Rob Grainger 24-Feb-09 3:06  I think Luc may have been hinting at this - he'd better remember not to make such hints so subtle next time... "they probably will have introduced a new keyword yielding some attention to more recent customers..." Re: Nice usage of foreach Luc Pattyn24-Feb-09 3:31 Luc Pattyn 24-Feb-09 3:31  Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles] - before you ask a question here, search CodeProject, then Google - the quality and detail of your question reflects on the effectiveness of the help you are likely to get - use the code block button (PRE tags) to preserve formatting when showing multi-line code snippets Re: Nice usage of foreach PIEBALDconsult24-Feb-09 16:21 PIEBALDconsult 24-Feb-09 16:21  Party pooper. Re: Nice usage of foreach Luc Pattyn24-Feb-09 16:36 Luc Pattyn 24-Feb-09 16:36  Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles] - before you ask a question here, search CodeProject, then Google - the quality and detail of your question reflects on the effectiveness of the help you are likely to get - use the code block button (PRE tags) to preserve formatting when showing multi-line code snippets Re: Nice usage of foreach itsravie2-Mar-09 23:23 itsravie 2-Mar-09 23:23  hey 10x for teling abt yield operator Ravie Busie Coding is my birth-right and bugs are part of feature my code has! Re: Nice usage of foreach Soundman32.225-Feb-09 6:12 Soundman32.2 25-Feb-09 6:12  I have seen this when the array doesn't contain a indexing property. return users[0]; // Doesn't work I seem to remember this being the default behaviour for non generic Lists in early .net (2?). Re: Nice usage of foreach JasonPSage27-Feb-09 7:14 JasonPSage 27-Feb-09 7:14  I've seen that - and I've also done this "kludge" when I literally didn't have time to look it up: e.g. Must get done fast, bigger fish to fry.. this works - move on. Not ideal - but - depends what's going on.. schedule.. time constraints. It's still readable at least. --Jason Know way to many languages... master of none! If File exist Yusuf11-Feb-09 4:13 Yusuf 11-Feb-09 4:13  I am supporting a legacy asp/vb COM app with little or no documentation I upgraded a server with some bug fixes, as usual something did not work. roll sleeve up and let us dig for clue. The COM app logs extensively to the event log, but there is no single entry. I checked all settting and there is no configuration issues. I gave up and started to look into the code why it is not logging and I came across If FileExists("C:\WriteLog.Txt") Then Dim objData As New Data Dim icnt As Integer icnt = 0 Do While Not FileExists(uploadPath) Or FileLen(uploadPath) = 0 If Not FileExists(uploadPath) Then Call objData.WriteToNTLog("No file", 2) Else Call objData.WriteToNTLog("Length 0", 2) End If Loop ' note that path to exe is quoted to allow spaces in path spec Call objData.WriteToNTLog("""" & GetImageMagickPath() & "convert"" """ & uploadPath & """" & opStr & " """ & thumbPath & """", 4) End If WHY check C:\WriteLog.txt before wrting to the event log. I am sure the app use to log to that file then they changed it to log to the eventlog. But why leave the file check there? The app has a configuration file and why not set logging flag in the app configuration file. Yusuf Re: If File exist Tony Pottier12-Feb-09 4:29 Tony Pottier 12-Feb-09 4:29  Why? Wouldn't be fun if everything was working perfectly. Re: If File exist oggenok6412-Feb-09 6:45 oggenok64 12-Feb-09 6:45  A silly oversight perhaps, but not really a horror. On a really bad day i might have committed the same "atrocity" A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought. Re: If File exist Yusuf12-Feb-09 8:15 Yusuf 12-Feb-09 8:15  Søren Turin wrote: A silly oversight perhaps, but not really a horror. On a really bad day i might have committed the same "atrocity" Laugh I agree. The code it self is not horror. But debugging why the application is not logging with is horror. This was a code I inherited and I was not aware of this piece of code. I found it out after spending 2 days to figure out why the app was not logging to the eventlog. Yusuf Re: If File exist Donsw17-Feb-09 2:37 Donsw 17-Feb-09 2:37  Could it be another application is writing to the file. and this is waiting for synchronization. bad programming with little comments. Not a real horror cheers, Donsw My Recent Article : Optimistic Concurrency with C# using the IOC and DI Design Patterns Re: If File exist dojohansen10-Mar-09 22:23 dojohansen 10-Mar-09 22:23  Classical! Presumably the dev didn't understand or did not care to understand what the old code was doing and decided to leave it there "just in case". At my company we've got the full source history in a sourcesafe database (though we are finally moving on to Team System now), but a lot of people still attempt to keep a full version history in the latest version of the code - never removing anything, but commenting it out and usually adding their initials and the date and time, as if this would actually help anyone later on. In my view it just distracts, and is never really useful since it's far easier to compare versions in sourcesafe than comparing the comments to the current code. Well, at least they comment it out rather than leave the old code in there... Re: If File exist Yusuf11-Mar-09 3:41 Yusuf 11-Mar-09 3:41  dojohansen wrote: but a lot of people still attempt to keep a full version history in the latest version of the code - never removing anything, but commenting it out and usually adding their initials and the date and time, as if this would actually help anyone later on. In my view it just distracts sometime, only on certain conditions, I leave old code behind commented out. Such as if I am making major logic change and what is change is not big piece of code I leave it for historical comparison. Beyond that I don't get it what the code needs to be polluted with old code. Yusuf Oh didn't you notice, analogous to square roots, they recently introduced rectangular, circular, and diamond roots to determine the size of the corresponding shapes when given the area. Luc Pattyn[^] Somewhat of a jem... cliran6-Feb-09 0:47 cliran 6-Feb-09 0:47  just look at this beauty: m_fooDictionary[m_fooList[p_fooIndex].BarTypeEnum][oldState]--; the interesting thing is that this line is repeated numerous times across a 1500+ lines class, sometimes with "++" or "--" at the end.. truly a great way to start off your day Re: Somewhat of a jem... PIEBALDconsult6-Feb-09 4:39 PIEBALDconsult 6-Feb-09 4:39  Looks OK, just add some horizontal space. Re: Somewhat of a jem... «_Superman_»6-Feb-09 17:00 «_Superman_» 6-Feb-09 17:00  No error checking for array bounds. «_Superman_» Re: Somewhat of a jem... PIEBALDconsult7-Feb-09 3:52 PIEBALDconsult 7-Feb-09 3:52  There might be, just not in that snippet, or maybe that's was a design decision, I can't tell from just that one statement. Re: Somewhat of a jem... Thomas Weller8-Feb-09 2:52 Thomas Weller 8-Feb-09 2:52  PIEBALDconsult wrote: Looks OK Yes, if you mean OK as in syntactically correct. But it's not very readable, this statement seems to say: I don't care too much about my team mates and/or maintainability. And if that is repeated many times throughout the class, sometimes with one -, sometimes with two, then it is only a question of time until a problem related to these statements will occur. www.thomas-weller.de Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. Programmer - an organism that turns coffee into software. Re: Somewhat of a jem... supercat99-Feb-09 8:09 supercat9 9-Feb-09 8:09  Thomas Weller wrote: And if that is repeated many times throughout the class, sometimes with one -, sometimes with two, then it is only a question of time until a problem related to these statements will occur. How could there be one '-'? Would that even parse? (BTW, the inability to parse a single trailing plus minus would seem a reason to favor i++ over ++i when the two operations would otherwise be interchangeable). If there were only one or two such statements in the code, I would probably be inclined to create temporary variables to hold the outputs of the various subexpressions. If the exact bit of code is repeated extremely often, I might be inclined to define a separate method for it. Otherwise I would expect someone parsing the code to example that classes referenced therein and determine what the different methods or properties mean. The expression seems pretty straightforward; if it only appeared once, expanding it to use temporary variables would make it easier to read, but if it appears many times, expanding it in such fashion would make one instance (the first one examined) easier to read and the rest bloated and annoying. Re: Somewhat of a jem... leppie11-Feb-09 4:48 leppie 11-Feb-09 4:48  Perfect for a Scheme macro, oh wait! You are not using Scheme! xacc.ide - now with TabsToSpaces support IronScheme - 1.0 beta 2 - out now! ((lambda (x) `((lambda (x) ,x) ',x)) '`((lambda (x) ,x) ',x)) True/False Dichotomy Geoff Field2-Feb-09 15:31 Geoff Field 2-Feb-09 15:31  Here's one I spotted in a previous life: We were working in C on protocol stacks. In every C file created by a group of contractors, we found the following statements: #define True 0 #define False 1 This was endemic throughout the code produced by this particular group of contractors. Fortunately, the product never came to be. The 2001 Tech Wreck did it in. Geoff Professional Geek, Amateur Stage-Levelling Gauge Re: True/False Dichotomy PIEBALDconsult2-Feb-09 16:05 PIEBALDconsult 2-Feb-09 16:05  Ew. While I agree that true should be zero (there are many ways of being wrong, but only one way to be correct; it's also orthogonal with strcmp), I still wouldn't do that. What we had at one place was: #define true (0==0) #define false (!true) Re: True/False Dichotomy [modified] Geoff Field2-Feb-09 16:09 Geoff Field 2-Feb-09 16:09  I've started to favour this form: #define TRUE (!0) #define FALSE (!TRUE) But at least I put it in a header rather than within every single source file. In this case, it was in *.c. Can you say "maintenance nightmare"? And they claimed they were a CMM level 5 company, too. Professional Geek, Amateur Stage-Levelling Gauge modified on Wednesday, February 4, 2009 6:19 PM Re: True/False Dichotomy PIEBALDconsult2-Feb-09 16:24 PIEBALDconsult 2-Feb-09 16:24  The (0==0) may be more portable, which is what they were after. I just tried (0==0) and (!0) on two compilers and both agreed that they equal 1, but that may not always be (or have been) the case.

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