undefined | Better HN

0 pointsarethuza6y ago0 comments

But don't do what one memorably awful project I had to maintain did - to use that example they would have done:

country_code==FIFTY_FIVE and day_of_week==ONE

0 comments

spuz6y ago

But what if the definition of 55 changes? You'll be glad to have your table of constants then.

The project also defined HTTP, COLON, SLASH, WWW and DOT so that you would have:

   string url = HTTP + COLON + SLASH + SLASH + WWW + DOT ...

I swear I'm not making this up....

> "There is a famously bad comment style: ...

Don't laugh now, wait until you see it in real life."

Well at least a typo sould give a compile time error for some subset of typos.

But in the trade-off in code readability was probably the cause of many other mistakes, so probably ended up further behind.

Sounds like a PHP codebase I'm currently working in. I shit you not, $LI = '<li>' is in the functions file, along with $LI_END.

But how else will your compiler tell you that you mistyped 55? /s

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse