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

Answer 1

We had to sort all the functions in classes alphabetically, to make them "easier to find". Never mind the ide had a drop down. That was too many clicks.

(same tech lead wrote an app to remove all comments from our source code).

Answer 2

No ternary operator allowed where I currently work:

int value = (a < b) ? a : b;

... because not everyone "gets it". If you told me, "Don't use it because we've had to rewrite them when the structures get too complicated" (nested ternary operators, anyone?), then I'd understand. But when you tell me that some developers don't understand them... um... Sure.

Answer 3

Half of the team favored four-space indentation; the other half favored two-space indentation.

As you can guess, the coding standard mandated three, so as to "offend all equally" (a direct quote).

Answer 4

Almost any kind of hungarian notation.

The problem with hungarian notation is that it is very often misunderstood. The original idea was to prefix the variable so that the meaning was clear. For example:

int appCount = 0; // Number of apples.
int pearCount = 0; // Number of pears.

But most people use it to determine the type.

int iAppleCount = 0; // Number of apples.
int iPearCount = 0;  // Number of pears.

This is confusing, because although both numbers are integers, everybody knows, you can't compare apples with pears.

Answer 5

Doing all database queries via stored procedures in Sql Server 2000. From complex multi-table queries to simple ones like:

select id, name from people

The arguments in favor of procedures were:

• Performance
• Security
• Maintainability

I know that the procedure topic is quite controversial, so feel free to score my answer negatively ;)

Answer 6

I once worked under the tyranny of the Mighty VB King.

The VB King was the pure master of MS Excel and VBA, as well as databases (Hence his surname : He played with Excel while the developers worked with compilers, and challenging him on databases could have detrimental effects on your career...).

Of course, his immense skills gave him an unique vision of development problems and project management solutions: While not exactly coding standards in the strictest sense, the VB King regularly had new ideas about "coding standards" and "best practices" he tried (and oftentimes succeeded) to impose on us. For example:

• All C/C++ arrays shall start at index 1, instead of 0. Indeed, the use of 0 as first index of an array is obsolete, and has been superseded by Visual Basic 6's insightful array index management.

• All functions shall return an error code: There are no exceptions in VB6, so why would we need them at all? (i.e. in C++)

• Since "All functions shall return an error code" is not practical for functions returning meaningful types, all functions shall have an error code as first [in/out] parameter.

• All our code will check the error codes (this led to the worst case of VBScript if-indentation I ever saw in my career... Of course, as the "else" clauses were never handled, no error was actually found until too late).

• Since we're working with C++/COM, starting this very day, we will code all our DOM utility functions in Visual Basic.

• ASP 115 errors are evil. For this reason, we will use On Error Resume Next in our VBScript/ASP code to avoid them.

• XSL-T is an object oriented language. Use inheritance to resolve your problems (dumb surprise almost broke my jaw open this one day).

• Exceptions are not used, and thus should be removed. For this reason, we will uncheck the checkbox asking for destructor call in case of exception unwinding (it took days for an expert to find the cause of all those memory leaks, and he almost went berserk when he found out they had willingly ignored (and hidden) his technical note about checking the option again, sent handfuls of weeks before).

• catch all exceptions in the COM interface of our COM modules, and dispose them silently (this way, instead of crashing, a module would only appear to be faster... Shiny!... As we used the über error handling described above, it even took us some time to understand what was really happening... You can't have both speed and correct results, can you?).

• Starting today, our code base will split into four branches. We will manage their synchronization and integrate all bug corrections/evolutions by hand.

All but the C/C++ arrays, VB DOM utility functions and XSL-T as OOP language were implemented despite our protests. Of course, over the time, some were discovered, ahem, broken, and abandoned altogether.

Of course, the VB King credibility never suffered for that: Among the higher management, he remained a "top gun" technical expert...

This produced some amusing side effects, as you can see by following the link What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered?