The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 1 (of 5)

Funny comments

Hi, All!

Joel's article today reminded me something.
What is the funniest thing that you found in code comments?

Here is some chunk of Netscape code that I found on
http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/04/13feature2.html

/*
* nesting deeper and deeper, harder and harder, go, go, oh, OH, OHHHH!!
* Sorry, got carried away there.
*/
struct lo_FormElementOptionData_struct {

At some point I had nothing to do, so I was reading JWZ's source of xscreensaver, an actually did find something funny there too:

static void
startup_ehandler (String name, String type, String class,
String defalt, /* one can't even spel properly
in this joke of a language */
String *av, Cardinal *ac)
{
char fmt[512];
String p[10];
saver_info *si = global_si_kludge; /* I hate C so much... */
XrmDatabase *db = XtAppGetErrorDatabase(si->app);
*fmt = 0;
XtAppGetErrorDatabaseText(si->app, name, type, class, defalt,
fmt, sizeof(fmt)-1, *db);

fprintf (stderr, "%s: ", blurb());

memset (p, 0, sizeof(p));
if (*ac > countof (p)) *ac = countof (p);
memcpy ((char *) p, (char *) av, (*ac) * sizeof(*av));
fprintf (stderr, fmt, /* Did I mention that I hate C? */
p[0], p[1], p[2], p[3], p[4], p[5], p[6], p[7], p[8], p[9]);
fprintf (stderr, "\n");

Michael K
Friday, February 1, 2002

somebody needs to teach jamie about vsprintf (:

Joel Spolsky
Friday, February 1, 2002

I hope you meant vfprintf or perhaps vsnprintf.

It's also perfectly possible that xscreensaver was written at a time when not everyone had fully compliant C89 compiler and libraries...

Fredrik Lundh
Saturday, February 2, 2002

I was working in Tech Support a number of years ago and ran across a problem with our product regarding dates (leap year, I think).

The code had been previouslly purchased from another company and the developer responsible for it for us spent about 5 minutes looking it over before he found the problem.

He said it was easy once he saw the comment:

/* Not really right */

John
Saturday, February 2, 2002

My favorite comment, which I've seen in some Microsoft source code:

/* IWDFWI */

Translation: It works, don't fuck with it.

Mike Gunderloy
Saturday, February 2, 2002

C code has so many kinds of interesting comments, doesn't it.

Following a more detailed discussion, this summary:
/*
*CBW - REMOVED HACK 27 OCT 1999 to add new hacks.
*/

And at the beginning of a badly written, complex routine, which had changed 'ownership' at least once:
/* I have no clue what this does, so stop asking me & go bug Rick. -Ryan */

Mikayla
Tuesday, February 5, 2002

I once worked with someone who had the old college textbook with the early Unix source code. One of the comments (buried somewhere deep in a presumably-tricky routine) was "You are not expected to understand this."

Steve Wheeler
Tuesday, February 5, 2002

Do a find/xargs/grep -i "f..k" on a Linux kernel code...

Andrzej Kocon
Wednesday, February 6, 2002

> You are not expected to understand this.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/odd.html

Fredrik Lundh
Wednesday, February 6, 2002

OK, my favourite one is "None of the programs in this monograph, needless to say, has been tested on a machine.", from "A discipline of programming", EWD, Prentice-Hall 1976, ISBN 0-13-215871-X. Btw., his manuscripts are available online (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD, see the EWD-numbered documents link), and let me quote from EWD1305: "I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I'm a computer scientist".

Andrzej Kocon
Thursday, February 7, 2002

From the source code for Origin's Strike Commander some years back (edited for prime time viewing):

/* This has to be the goat f*** hack of the century. */

It also had one of my favorite crash messages (this was MS-DOS, remember). Something like:

Strike Commander has unexpectedly ended. You might find it convenient to reboot now.

Donavon Keithley
Sunday, February 10, 2002

Scritpting in PHP.
Had a lot of argument (sometimes pretty violent - I'm french, you know, we carry this in our DNA) with my project manager.
I was fed up to see his "narrow-minded" and "short-time-overlooking" point of view. He asked me *not to* code a function i *knew* the client would ask.

I decided to write the function anyway.

/* some day they will thank me for that */

Bruno Bord
Wednesday, October 1, 2003