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.

Re: smart way to detect if System.Boolean true or false

Tallmaris15-Mar-11 1:23

Tallmaris

15-Mar-11 1:23

eheh, you are right. Anyway, I was just quoting one of the most famous WTF:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_.aspx[^]

Big Grin | :-D

Re: smart way to detect if System.Boolean true or false

OriginalGriff15-Mar-11 1:27

OriginalGriff

15-Mar-11 1:27

Not seen that before - thanks!

Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together.

Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."

Re: smart way to detect if System.Boolean true or false

Rick Shaub15-Mar-11 7:51

Rick Shaub

15-Mar-11 7:51

Dang! Beat me to it.

Marking it as "news" is pretty hilarious.

Re: smart way to detect if System.Boolean true or false

Bernhard Hiller14-Mar-11 3:50

Bernhard Hiller

14-Mar-11 3:50

Happy debugging! Internationalization will make you happy.
I experienced that a long time ago. See also my message in the Hall of Shame:
http://www.codeproject.com/feature/HallOfSHame.aspx?msg=3432553#xx3432553xx[^]

Re: smart way to detect if System.Boolean true or false

Baruch2322-Mar-11 14:39

Baruch23

22-Mar-11 14:39

Dear VUnreal,

Please find below a simplified code segment that may help you in achieving your code in one line using a helper class.

please feel free to add additional checks and safeguards, and rewrite the helper as an extension to the string class.

string valueStr = value.ToString();
TruthChecker tc=new TruthChecker();
// now notice how simple: we do not use 'if', just call our helper once:
PDFIncludeWatermark_ = tc.CheckIfTrue();


    class TruthChecker
    {
        private static List<string> _truths = null; // static - optimaze time as the calculation is only done if needed and even so , only once!
        List<string> Truths { get { return _truths!=null ? _truths : (_truths = FindAllTruths() ); } }

        TruthChecker() {
        }

        private static List<string> FindAllTruths() {
             List<string> allTruths = new List<string>();
             char[] t = {'t','r','u','e'};
             for(int i=0;i<Math.Pow(2,t.Length); i++) {
                StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
                for(int j=0; j<t.Length; j++) {
                    int k = (i>>j)&1;
                    sb.Append(t[j]+('A'-'a')*k);
                }
                allTruths.Add(sb.ToString());
            }
            return allTruths;
        }

        public string CheckIfTrue(string tru)
        {
            try {
                var v = 
                    from t in Truths
                    where t == tru
                    select t;

                if (v.ElementAt(0).ToString().Length == "true".Length) {
                    return "true";
                }
            } catch (Exception ex) {
                tru = ex.Message;
            }
            return "false";
        }
    }

Please visit IOCCC.org to learn more about useful coding techniques.

Exception handling

Thallian3-Mar-11 19:57

Thallian

3-Mar-11 19:57

Why do so many think that try - catch blocks are just here to stop you from seeing runtime errors?
It is a plain nightmare to debug a project which has code like this sprinkled all over the place.
(Note: I removed some confidental information from the code)

try
{
  if (SomeConstant != "")
  {
    this.comboBox.SelectedItem = this.comboBox.Items[this.comboBox.Items.IndexOf(SomeConstant)];
  }
}
catch { }

Or one of my favourites:

protected override bool Exists()
{
    bool returnValue = false;
    try
    {
      // guess what happens when the webservice access throws an exception...      
      product = GetProductOverWebservice()

      if (product != null && product.product_id == m_RecordID.ToString())
      {
        _product = productinfo;
        returnValue = true;
      }
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
      //great, just comment the only thing that could tell at least that an error occured
      //base.DebugWrite("\tError: " + ex.ToString(), MODUL_NAME);
    }
    return returnValue;
}