What was the strangest coding standard rule that you were forced to follow? [closed]

Answer 1

Maybe not the most outlandish one you'll get, but I really really hate when I have to preface database table names with 'tbl'

Answer 2

I hate it when the use of multiple returns is banned.

Answer 3

The very strangest one I had, and one which took me quite some time to overthrow, was when the owner of our company demanded that our new product be IE only. If it could work on FireFox, that was OK, but it had to be IE only.

This might not sound too strange, except for one little flaw. All of the software was for a bespoke server software package, running on Linux, and all client boxes that our customer was buying were Linux. Short of trying to figure out how to get Wine (in those days, very unreliable) up and running on all of these boxes and seeing if we could get IE running and training their admins how to debug Wine problems, it simply wasn't possible to meet the owner's request. The problem was that he was doing the Web design and simply didn't know how to make Web sites compliant with FireFox.

It probably won't shock you to know that that our company went bankrupt.

Answer 4

Not being able to use Reflection as the manager claimed it involved too much 'magic'.

Answer 5

We were doing a C++ project and the team lead was a Pascal guy.

So we had a coding standard include file to redefine all that pesky C and C++ syntax:

#define BEGIN {
#define END }

but wait there's more!

#define ENDIF }
#define CASE switch

etc. It's hard to remember after all this time.

This took what would have been perfectly readable C++ code and made it illegible to anyone except the team lead.

We also had to use reverse Hungarian notation, i.e.

MyClass *class_pt  // pt = pointer to type

UINT32 maxHops_u   // u = uint32

although oddly I grew to like this.

Answer 6

At a former job:

• "Normal" tables begin with T_
• "System" tables (usually lookups) begin with TS_ (except when they don't because somebody didn't feel like it that day)
• Cross-reference tables begin with TSX_
• All field names begin with F_

Yes, that's right. All of the fields, in every single table. So that we can tell it's a field.