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: If only there were a language construct to handle this case...

lewax0015-Aug-13 3:49

lewax00

15-Aug-13 3:49

Rob Grainger wrote:
it frequently decodes for-loops like this

Of course, the simplest way to write a loop in an assembly-like language is something like:

C++

// for ([assignment]; [condition]; [increment]) { [body] }
[assignment]
start_loop:
if ![condition] goto end_loop
[body]
[increment]
goto start_loop
end_loop:

That doesn't mean it should be written that way in a high-level language though, even if you technically can.

Re: If only there were a language construct to handle this case...

Dan Neely19-Aug-13 3:24

Dan Neely

19-Aug-13 3:24

Rob's suggesting the duhveloper just stole recompiled code out of reflector without thinking; and building in logic to detect all 90 bazillion high level constructs and correctly promote the result of reflection to them instead of the simplest valid code is 99.9999% of the work involved in writing a reflection tool. The length of the long tail means that it's a job that will probably never be done.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

Re: If only there were a language construct to handle this case...

Rob Grainger26-Aug-13 22:27

Rob Grainger

26-Aug-13 22:27

Thank you for saving me the effort, exactly my point.

"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.

I just made a secret GOTO

peterchen13-Aug-13 7:15

peterchen

13-Aug-13 7:15

C++

while(true)  // repeat after upgrade
{
  thingie.Open();
  if (thingie.Stale() && YesUserReallyWantsToUpgrade())
  {
     thingie.Close();
     continue;
  }
  // ...
  break;
}

On the plus side, I've had secret santa's that were worse. On the down side, that would look better with a goto, which doesn't sound exactly good.

ORDER BY what user wants

Re: I just made a secret GOTO

Lutosław13-Aug-13 23:40

Lutosław

13-Aug-13 23:40

We can hide goto[^] even better:

bread.Open();
try
{
  if (bread.Stale() && Banana()) // better naming!
  {
      throw DamnUserSeeksDooom();
  }
  // ...
} 
catch (DamnUserSeeksDooom DUST)
{
   dust.Sweep();
}
finally
{
   bread.close();
}

Teez ~~java~~OOP style. The more blue words the more proffesional code looks, you know. Roll eyes | :rolleyes:

Greetings - Jacek

Re: I just made a secret GOTO

Argonia13-Aug-13 23:53

Argonia

13-Aug-13 23:53

Jacek Gajek wrote:
catch (DamnUserSeeksDooom DUST)
{
dust.Sweep();
}

i guess you swept your DUST before the actual call and it became smaler dust Big Grin | :-D

P.S sleeping only 5 hours isn't working well with my spelling skills.

Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true

Re: I just made a secret GOTO

Freak3013-Aug-13 23:50

Freak30

13-Aug-13 23:50

So the thingie refuses to upgrade, because it does nothing as long as the user wants it to upgrade? What does it do if the user doesn't want it to upgrade? Does it upgrade in this case?

The good thing about pessimism is, that you are always either right or pleasently surprised.

Re: I just made a secret GOTO

peterchen14-Aug-13 1:24

peterchen

14-Aug-13 1:24

That's a bit mroe complex than this simplified example of course (surprisingly, I don't have variales named "thingie" in there) - depending on the forma,t it's read only access or no access at all, indeed.

Since the conversion runs in a separate process, I'm in the middle of a transaction, and I have to be careful to throw more milliseconds into that piece of code, tat "close, convert and retry" seems to be the best approach.

Alternatively, I thought of an inner function that returns either the newly initialized session, or information about how to upgrade, but that code doesn#t look much better either.

ORDER BY what user wants

Something original

Super Lloyd6-Aug-13 21:03

Super Lloyd

6-Aug-13 21:03

Inheriting the maintenance of some 3rd party code today!
Mused over it, looking at the compilation warningS....

I did find this piece of code, aw... I should say, while I know it's valid C#, it displays a creativity beyond my own!!!

public class DesignRegistrationSearchCriteria
{
    public string Manufacturer { get; set; }
    public string manufacturer { get; set; }
    // ...
}

My programming get away... The Blog...
DirectX for WinRT/C# since 2013!
Taking over the world since 1371!