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: True that

RobCroll13-Oct-11 16:29

RobCroll

13-Oct-11 16:29

while(true) is one of my pet hates.

"You get that on the big jobs."

Re: True that

Firo Atrum Ventus13-Oct-11 16:38

Firo Atrum Ventus

13-Oct-11 16:38

Why?

Oxfords English < Official CCC Players Dictionary

Excuse me for my improper grammar and typos.
It's because English is my primary language, not my first language.

My first languages are C# and Java.
VB, ASP, JS, PHP and SQL are my second language.
Indonesian came as my third language.
My fourth language? I'm still creating it, I'll let you know when it's done! Big Grin | :-D

Re: True that

RobCroll13-Oct-11 17:51

RobCroll

13-Oct-11 17:51

while(true) isn't self-documenting

while(true)
{
   .... lots of code
   if(drunk) break;
   drinkBeer();
   .... lots more code
}

I much prefer

while(!drunk)
{
   .... lots of code
   drunk = true;
   if(drunk) continue;

   drinkBeer();
   .... lots more code
}

Although its probably just the drink beer bit I really like Smile | :)

"You get that on the big jobs."

Re: True that

Firo Atrum Ventus13-Oct-11 19:37

Firo Atrum Ventus

13-Oct-11 19:37

RobCroll wrote:
while(true) isn't self-documenting

Guess that's where comments comes in handy.

RobCroll wrote:

while(true)
{
   .... lots of code
   if(drunk) break;
   drinkBeer();
   .... lots more code
}

I much prefer

while(!drunk)
{
   .... lots of code
   drunk = true;
   if(drunk) continue;
 
   drinkBeer();
   .... lots more code
}

I'm a fan of while(true) but the first is simply garbage, I never used it like that.

Re: True that

RobCroll13-Oct-11 21:34

RobCroll

13-Oct-11 21:34

You've got my interested now. So how do you use while(true) without coding garbage like break; (or return)?

"You get that on the big jobs."

Re: True that

Firo Atrum Ventus13-Oct-11 21:47

Firo Atrum Ventus

13-Oct-11 21:47

No, no, don't misunderstand me. I use break;, continue;(above loop) or return;
It's the context that I disagree with (ie. if you can make it simple with just a boolean, why do you need a while(true)?).

Re: True that

ii_noname_ii27-Oct-11 2:58

ii_noname_ii

27-Oct-11 2:58

I actually have a LOT of While 1=1 in MS SQL...
It's very cool, works great, and I just love to see the face of programmers when I show them with pride my nested while 1=1 loops in recursive stored procs...
Poke tongue | ;-P

Philosophy Major bad Programmer

Frank Towle6-Oct-11 4:01

Frank Towle

6-Oct-11 4:01

I think we all know that writing software is a matter of black and white. There may be many different ways to successfully solve a given problem, but the different methods will produce concrete results - unless you are writing in Prolog, then you may not know the outcome. We also tend to find a method that ‘works for us’ and continue to use that same sequence of code to solve similar problems.

A programmer working with me many years ago either had a short attention span or leaned on his professors’ admonition that everything in the world is gray… He would never reuse a snippet that worked and because we were asked to comment our code (this was back in cryptic Assembler/Fortran land) he would liberally sprinkle ‘THIS MIGHT WORK’ anywhere there was questionable logic.

Lesson: Don’t hire Philosophy Majors for Dev projects!

Gray beard, but no holey tee-shirts, 50+ yrs writing software.