Tzyj

Tzyj : John Baumgart : baumgart@chicagonet.net : 2000-10-29

Five things came to mind in your Unmaintainable Code essay:

You suggested using #define begi { to make C look less like C. One place I worked for (a large defense contractor with too many imbeciles with too much time on their hands) went one step further. We had:

#define IS_EQUAL ==
#define LESS_THAN <
#define LESS_EQUAL <=

and so on — perhaps to make C look more like COBOL (not that I’ve ever touched COBOL). A simple adjustment of the header file to:

#define LESS_THAN <=
#define LESS_EQUAL <

and, well, you get the picture.

Among the variable names such as 'asterisk' and 'openParen', you miss the obvious. Behold:

int seven = 5;

When corporate coding guidelines preclude the use of single letter variables, their phonetic equivalents do nicely:

i becomes eye
h becomes aitch
n becomes en
x becomes eks or eques, empowering you to take advantage of homophones, another powerful tool.

C++ begs for you to use something like:

char *that;

Insults, such as boob, moron, buffoon, and idiot also make nice variable names. A former colleague had a function called ' tzyj'. Best I could figure out, it must have been some sort of Bulgarian expletive.

Where you recommend that you eschew { } around if-else blocks unless syntactically obligatory, you'll be glad to know that in C and C++ it is never obligatory. Use commas instead of semicolons, thus:

if (eieio)
  {
     eques = seven;
     wye = six;
  }

becomes

if (eieio)
   eques = seven,
   wye = six;

Both do the same thing, which is formatting your hard drive, since I overloaded the = operator.

Why use 'if' at all, when you can use || instead?

if (rot)
     splunge ();

becomes

(! rot || splunge ());

Alarming threats in comments, such as

/******!!!!!! COMPUTER GENERATED CODE SECTION - DO NOT MODIFY !!!!!!******/

Enjoy!

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