What was the strangest coding standard rule that y

Question

When I asked this question I got almost always a definite yes you should have coding standards.

What was the strangest coding standard rule that you were ever forced to follow?

And by strangest I mean funniest, or worst, or just plain odd.

In each answer, please mention which language, what your team size was, and which ill effects it caused you and your team.

Answer 1

At my first job, all C programs, no matter how simple or complex, had only four functions. You had the main, which called the other three functions in turn. I can't remember their names, but they were something along the lines of begin(), middle(), and end(). begin() opened files and database connections, end() closed them, and middle() did everything else. Needless to say, middle() was a very long function.

And just to make things even better, all variables had to be global.

One of my proudest memories of that job is having been part of the general revolt that led to the destruction of those standards.

Answer 2

In 1987 or so, I took a job with a company that hired me because I was one of a small handful of people who knew how to use Revelation. Revelation, if you've never heard of it, was essentially a PC-based implementation of the Pick operating system - which, if you've never heard of it, got its name from its inventor, the fabulously-named Dick Pick. Much can be said about the Pick OS, most of it good. A number of supermini vendors (Prime and MIPS, at least) used Pick, or their own custom implementations of it.

This company was a Prime shop, and for their in-house systems they used Information. (No, that was really its name: it was Prime's implementation of Pick.) They had a contract with the state to build a PC-based system, and had put about a year into their Revelation project before the guy doing all the work, who was also their MIS director, decided he couldn't do both jobs anymore and hired me.

At any rate, he'd established a number of coding standards for their Prime-based software, many of which derived from two basic conditions: 1) the use of 80-column dumb terminals, and 2) the fact that since Prime didn't have a visual editor, he'd written his own. Because of the magic portability of Pick code, he'd brought his editor down into Revelation, and had built the entire project on the PC using it.

Revelation, of course, being PC-based, had a perfectly good full-screen editor, and didn't object when you went past column 80. However, for the first several months I was there, he insisted that I use his editor and his standards.

So, the first standard was that every line of code had to be commented. Every line. No exceptions. His rationale for that was that even if your comment said exactly what you had just written in the code, having to comment it meant you at least thought about the line twice. Also, as he cheerfully pointed out, he'd added a command to the editor that formatted each line of code so that you could put an end-of-line comment.

Oh, yes. When you commented every line of code, it was with end-of-line comments. In short, the first 64 characters of each line were for code, then there was a semicolon, and then you had 15 characters to describe what your 64 characters did. In short, we were using an assembly language convention to format our Pick/Basic code. This led to things that looked like this:

EVENT.LIST[DATE.INDEX][-1] = _         ;ADD THE MOST RECENT EVENT
   EVENTS[LEN(EVENTS)]                 ;TO THE END OF EVENT LIST

(Actually, after 20 years I have finally forgotten R/Basic's line-continuation syntax, so it may have looked different. But you get the idea.)

Additionally, whenever you had to insert multiline comments, the rule was that you use a flower box:

************************************************************************
**  IN CASE YOU NEVER HEARD OF ONE, OR COULDN'T GUESS FROM ITS NAME,  **
**  THIS IS A FLOWER BOX.                                             **
************************************************************************

Yes, those closing asterisks on each line were required. After all, if you used his editor, it was just a simple editor command to insert a flower box.

Getting him to relent and let me use Revelation's built-in editor was quite a battle. At first he was insistent, simply because those were the rules. When I objected that a) I already knew the Revelation editor b) it was substantially more functional than his editor, c) other Revelation developers would have the same perspective, he retorted that if I didn't train on his editor I wouldn't ever be able to work on the Prime codebase, which, as we both knew, was not going to happen as long as hell remained unfrozen over. Finally he gave in.

But the coding standards were the last to go. The flower-box comments in particular were a stupid waste of time, and he fought me tooth and nail on them, saying that if I'd just use the right editor maintaining them would be perfectly easy. (The whole thing got pretty passive-aggressive.) Finally I quietly gave in, and from then on all of the code I brought to code reviews had his precious flower-box comments.

One day, several months into the job, when I'd pretty much proven myself more than competent (especially in comparison with the remarkable parade of other coders that passed through that office while I worked there), he was looking over my shoulder as I worked, and he noticed I wasn't using flower-box comments. Oh, I said, I wrote a source-code formatter that converts my comments into your style when I print them out. It's easier than maintaining them in the editor. He opened his mouth, thought for a moment, closed it, went away, and we never talked about coding standards again. Both of our jobs got easier after that.

Answer 3

Once worked on a project where underscores were banned. And I mean totally banned. So in a c# winforms app, whenever we added a new event handler (e.g. for a button) we'd have to rename the default method name from buttonName_Click() to something else, just to satisfy the ego of the guy that wrote the coding standards. To this day I don't know what he had against the humble underscore

Answer 4

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 5

I've had a lot of stupid rules, but not a lot that I considered downright strange.

The sillyiest was on a NASA job I worked back in the early 90's. This was a huge job, with well over 100 developers on it. The experienced developers who wrote the coding standards decided that every source file should begin with a four letter acronym, and the first letter had to stand for the group that was responsible for the file. This was probably a great idea for the old FORTRAN 77 projects they were used to.

However, this was an Ada project, with a nice hierarchal library structure, so it made no sense at all. Every directory was full of files starting with the same letter, followed by 3 more nonsense leters, an underscore, and then part of the file name that mattered. All the Ada packages had to start with this same five-character wart. Ada "use" clauses were not allowed either (arguably a good thing under normal circumstances), so that meant any reference to any identifier that wasn't local to that source file also had to include this useless wart. There probably should have been an insurrection over this, but the entire project was staffed by junior programmers and fresh from college new hires (myself being the latter).

A typical assignment statement (already verbose in Ada) would end up looking something like this:

NABC_The_Package_Name.X := NABC_The_Package_Name.X + 
  CXYZ_Some_Other_Package_Name.Delta_X;

Fortunately they were at least enlightened enough to allow us more than 80 columns! Still, the facility wart was hated enough that it became boilerplate code at the top of everyone's source files to use Ada "renames" to get rid of the wart. There'd be one rename for each imported ("withed") package. Like this:

package Package_Name renames NABC_Package_Name;
package Some_Other_Package_Name renames CXYZ_Some_Other_Package_Name;
--// Repeated in this vein for an average of 10 lines or so

What the more creative among us took to doing was trying to use the wart to make an acutally sensible (or silly) package name. (I know what you are thinking, but explitives were not allowed and shame on you! That's disgusting). For example, I was in the Common code group, and I needed to make a package to interface with the Workstation group. After a brainstorming session with the Workstation guy, we decided to name our packages so that someone needing both would have to write:

with CANT_Interface_Package;
with WONT_Interface_Package;

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?