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

Answer 1

a friend of mine - we'll call him CodeMonkey - got his first job out of college [many years ago] doing in-house development in COBOL. His first program was rejected as 'not complying with our standards' because it used... [shudder!] nested IF statements

the coding standards banned the use of nested IF statements

now, CodeMonkey was not shy and was certain of his abilities, so he persisted in asking everyone up the chain and down the aisle why this rule existed. Most claimed they did not know, some made up stuff about 'readability', and finally one person remembered the original reason: the first version of the COBOL compiler they used had a bug and didn't handle nested IF statements correctly.

This compiler bug, of course, had been fixed for at least a decade, but no one had challenged the standards. [baaa!]

CodeMonkey was successful in getting the standards changed - eventually!

Answer 2

A buddy of mine encountered this rule while working at a government job. The use of ++ (pre or post) was completely banned. The reason: Different compilers might interpret it differently.

Answer 3

There must be 165 unit tests (not necessarily automated) per 1000 lines of code. That works out at one test for roughly every 8 lines.

Needless to say, some of the lines of code are quite long, and functions return this pointers to allow chaining.

Answer 4

An externally-written C coding standard that had the rule 'don't rely on built in operator precedence, always use brackets'

Fair enough, the obvious intent was to ban:

a = 3 + 6 * 2;

in favour of:

a = 3 + (6 * 2);

Thing was, this was enforced by a tool that followed the C syntax rules that '=', '==', '.' and array access are operators. So code like:

a[i].x += b[i].y + d - 7;

had to be written as:

((a[i]).x) += (((b[i]).y + d) - 7);

Answer 5

When I started working at one place, and started entering my code into the source control, my boss suddenly came up to me, and asked me to stop committing so much. He told me it is discouraged to do more than 1 commit per-day for a developer because it litters the source control. I simply gaped at him...

Later I understood that the reason he even came up to me about it is because the SVN server would send him (and 10 more high executives) a mail for each commit someone makes. And by littering the source control I guessed he ment his mailbox.

Answer 6

Hungarian notation in general.