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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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