Comment Malice  Comment Malice

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Here is an email I received in response to my essay on how to write unmaintainable code.

Comment Malice : Stephen Griswold : griswold@csee.wvu.edu : 2000-09-26

loved that essay — some of those tricks are downright cruel.

I have a couple suggestions for messing with those use code beautifiers (in spite of attempts to ban them. ;) )

in the version we have at wvu there are some bugs that drive me crazy. (gnu emacs 19.34.1 (sparc-sun-solaris2.5, motif) of thu may 15 1997 on stat copyright (c) 1996 free software foundation, inc.)

  1. special characters in the single line comments (the double backslash //) are not ignored by the beautifier, so if you liberally sprinkle in braces and parentheses in lines or partial lines with // comments, the beautifier will be all over the place (emoticons could even be used to deflect initial attention ;) )

    I’ve learned to avoid //comments and instead use /*comments*/

  2. in ada and some of the other languages, it does a better job ignoring comments, but you can still mix in checks for the actual character. such as:
    OpenParen := (Char = '(');

    i've learned to get around that by mixing in complementary boolean expressions such as:
    OpenParen := ( (Char = '(') or ('1' = ')') );
    in a second semester Ada class, i was helping someone store an expression in a tree, and the above was the only way i could get the emacs beautifier to work correctly - of course for those who don’t use beautifiers would be rather dumbfounded as to why you would add an always false expression to an or statement :P It even could be used as a way to ban beautifiers ;)

I'm sure with experimentation, all sorts of other interesting bugs can be found in the beautifiers that can be exploited towards that goal of unmaintainable code :)

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