Tzyj

Here is an email I received in response to one of my essays.

Tzyj : John Baumgart : baumgart@chicagonet.net : 2000-10-29

Five things came to mind in your Unmaintainable Code essay:

1. You suggested using #define begi { to make C look less like C. One place I worked for (a large defense contractor with too many imbeciles with too much time on their hands) went one step further. We had:

   #define IS_EQUAL ==
   #define LESS_THAN <
   #define LESS_EQUAL <=

   and so on — perhaps to make C look more like COBOL (not that I’ve ever touched COBOL). A simple adjustment of the header file to:

   #define LESS_THAN <=
   #define LESS_EQUAL <

   and, well, you get the picture.

2. Among the variable names such as 'asterisk' and 'openParen', you miss the obvious. Behold:

   int seven = 5;

   When corporate coding guidelines preclude the use of single letter variables, their phonetic equivalents do nicely:

   i becomes eye
   h becomes aitch
   n becomes en
   x becomes eks or eques, empowering you to take advantage of homophones, another powerful tool.

   C++ begs for you to use something like:

   char *that;

   Insults, such as boob, moron, buffoon and idiot also make nice variable names. A former colleague had a function called ' tzyj'. Best I could figure out, it must have been some sort of Bulgarian expletive.

3. Where you recommend that you eschew { } around if-else blocks unless syntactically obligatory, you'll be glad to know that in C and C++ it is never obligatory. Use commas instead of semicolons, thus:

   if (eieio)
     {
        eques = seven;
        wye = six;
     }

   becomes

   if (eieio)
      eques = seven,
      wye = six;

   Both do the same thing, which is formatting your hard drive, since I overloaded the = operator.
4. Why use 'if' at all, when you can use || instead?

   if (rot)
        splunge ();

   becomes

   (! rot || splunge ());

5. Alarming threats in comments, such as

   /******!!!!!! COMPUTER GENERATED CODE SECTION - DO NOT MODIFY !!!!!!******/

Enjoy!

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