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Ridiculously long identifier of the day: Connect_catcher_line_to_PIC_ink_port__Connect_duct_line_to_PIC_storage_port__Then_Step_Up
All 90 characters of it. Yes, I created it deliberately and yes I know it includes two occurrences of two underscores in a row.
To make matters worse, it's an enum value, identifying a bit in a mask.
Thank [diety-of-choice] for IntelliSense.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I would consider that a nominee as a potential candidate of the year. Nice effort. 
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Thanks. I have had longer ones (I remember a resource identifier that was close to 200), but this one set a recent record.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Most excellent in every way! 
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Thank you, thank you! I'm here all week. Try the veal, it's to die for!
Software Zen: delete this;
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How about a GUID instead?! 
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Looks like 3 bits in one.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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When I started Uni, we were told we had to have meaningful identifiers. This was back in the punched card days (80 cols per card). So, as a silent protest, I wrote my Assessed Practical Work with every identifier being exactly 80 chars long. This mean that each identifier took a whole punched card and made the program unintelligible as it was impossible to use indentation. (It had one good benefit - I could just duplicate the cards with identifiers and slot them into the source deck as required, so I only had to type them once). I passed the Assessed Practical Work as the program worked and it had meaningful identifiers, but they were not amused.
P.S. Language was Algol60 - one of the few languages that allowed spaces in identifiers - that helped make them meaningful but the code even less straight forward to read.
modified 6-May-21 4:34am.
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At these days, we were working in PL1, which allowed free format, like C, with columns 9-72 of every card filled with a code. One programmer from our team liked to fill all this area with a code. Probably to save punched cards. To fix a bug, he needed to retype everything from the buggy card to the end. He didn't like a bugs in the beginning.
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What's "PIC"? Surely some acronym - and I do not understand it. Please write it out!
Oh sanctissimi Wilhelmus, Theodorus, et Fredericus!
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By gosh, you're right! Sadly it's such a part of our vocabulary (pronounced, er, "pick"), I don't even remember what it's an acronym of. If I had to guess, it would be "Printhead Interface Controller", which would then make the proper identifier
Connect_catcher_line_to_PrintheadInterfaceController_ink_port__Connect_duct_line_to_PrintheadInterfaceController_storage_port__Then_Step_Up I deliberately didn't replace the spaces in "Printhead Interface Controller" with underscores in order to emphasize that "PrintheadInterfaceController" is a component name.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Or Programmable Integrated Circuit? What does PIC stand for?[^] agrees, but also has Programmable Interrupt Controller and Peripheral Interface Controller and dozens of non-IT meanings.
Take your pic(k).
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
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In this case it's actually a board within our commercial ink-jet printer products. It accepts print data via a fiber optic connection and parcels it out to one or more arrays of jets. Depending upon configuration, we print somewhere around 1 billion (109) drops of ink per second, where each drop is around 6-9 picoliters.
Our marketing created an interesting visual a while back. If each of our drops of ink were the size of a drop of rain, we dump an Olympic swimming pool every second.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Can the ink jets be directed so the user gets sprayed in the face?
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Well, no. Ink-jet can get messy, however. Most of the bathrooms include a dispenser for a product called "Dye Gone" to get ink off your hands.
A well-known incident occurred some years ago when an upper-level executive was being given the grand tour of some of our labs. A piece of tubing cut loose and sprayed the guy with a head-to-feet stream of yellow ink. We bought him a new suit.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Wow! That puts it into perspective.
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C/mainarray.c at master · dequbed/C · GitHub[^]
I... uh... 
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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That was a thing of beauty. Duff's device to the next level.
Duff's device - Wikipedia[^]
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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Pardon me for being a tad dense, but... is that somehow a hand-assembled main() function, encoded in oh-so-useful decimal?
Software Zen: delete this;
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Pretty much.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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To coin a phrase: "Kill it before it runs."
Even if something like that were technically necessary (I could see it in embedded code), an array of completely undocumented random decimal integers is beyond ridiculous. Even if the compiler doesn't support the asm keyword and inline assembly, you could still list the array contents as hexadecimal values with the corresponding assembly code in adjacent comments.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Also ridiculous are names that activate horizontal scroll bars. But I digress.
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Ah, but there's a reason for the ridiculously long name. The name I listed is the longest for a group of enum values which are individual bits in a 32 bit mask. Each bit identifies a message that should be displayed to the operator. The equipment can identify a single message or several to be displayed at once. The messages don't lend themselves to any kind of consistent, concise naming scheme.
As we know, the following two problems are fundamentally difficult in computing:- Cache invalidation
- Creating appropriate identifiers
- Off-by-1 errors
The simplest and most logically consistent naming for each bit was therefore the text for that bit, with minor transformations to convert the text into a valid C++ identifier. Space characters and all punctuation became underscores, and Bob's your uncle.
Just to add to your excitement over this challenging and seemingly intransigent problem, there is ongoing grumbling from the equipment group over the text I actually display based upon each bit. They expect the exact text in their specification to be displayed. You see, I have this effete and unwanted fondness for grammatical English, which their text... isn't. We won't even mention (yes we will) the fact that our UI is also translated to French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese Simplified, Korean, Polish, and Russian. Some folks just kind of expect us to speak their language.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I'm changing ISP's in a week or so, so I resurrected an old app I wrote to monitor my ISP and tell me when it changed.
And it didn't work any more, because the IP Geolocation service I was using has changed and needs an API signup instead of presenting the data as CSV.
So, I thought I'd re-write it using HtmlAgilityPack.
But it was odd that I got no error message in the original code ... until I spotted this:
private void FillInDetails(string host)
{
Timestamp = DateTime.Now;
IPAddress addr = IPAddress.None;
try
{
using (WebClient wc = new WebClient())
{
if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(host))
{
host = "http://freegeoip.net/csv";
}
else
{
host = string.Format("http://freegeoip.net/csv{0}{1}", "/", host);
}
string data = wc.DownloadString(host);
string[] sections = BreakCSVLine(data);
if (sections.Length != freegeoipDataSectionsCount) throw new ArgumentException("Data returned from FreeGeoIP has changed format!");
addr = IPAddress.Parse(sections[freegeoipDataAddress]);
CountryCode = sections[freegeoipDataCountryCode];
Country = sections[freegeoipDataCountry];
RegionCode = sections[freegeoipDataRegionCode];
Region = sections[freegeoipDataRegion];
City = sections[freegeoipDataCity];
Zipcode = sections[freegeoipDataZipcode];
TimeZone = sections[freegeoipDataTimeZone];
Area = sections[freegeoipDataArea];
float lat = float.Parse(sections[freegeoipDataLatitude]);
float lon = float.Parse(sections[freegeoipDataLongditude]);
LatLong = new PointF(lon, lat);
}
}
catch (Exception)
{
}
Address = addr;
}
So I carefully create my own exception to tell me why it's not working ... and then explicitly ignore it.
I do wonder about past-me's thought processes sometimes ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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