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Amusing article comments
By Chris Maunder

A collection of amusing comments found inside production code

	VC 4-6, Win95-98, NT4, W2K
	Posted 25 Jun 2001
	Updated 27 Jun 2001
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16 users have rated this article. result:

4.5 out of 5.

Introduction

There have been a number of threads in the Lounge about amusing comments found in code. I was thinking that it would be fun to have a page devoted to the most amusing comments found in production code.

Be warned that posting code and or comments from your company's code may breach confidentiality or copyright, so ensure you have permission to post the comment text before doing so.

Please add your amusing comments in the discussion thread below. Periodically I'll sweep through the comments and incorporate them into the article itself.

The Pick of the Bunch so far.

Malcolm McMahon I'll always remember with affection the message from a compiler on an old mini (for a peculiar language of its own). Instead of No Errors it came up with the, much more realistic,

None of your errors have been found

Christian Graus

Here is a block of comments running between me and another developer here (Jono) over the course of a few months.

//Chunker File Format calls
/*******************************************************************/
//Jono's really cool stuff for sergei

//of course everything I write is *COOL*, but these chunks are worth mentioning...
/*******************************************************************/

// Some of us are more insecure than others, I guess...... 

// Damn your black heart Christian Graus....

I'm not sure how he knew it was me, but I nearly fell over laughing when I found his reply....

Another comment from Jono

//just ask jl if you can't understand that last line, I wrote it and I don't understand it....

And a block I wrote after having to fix the portion of the code that remembered if the file had been saved since modification for about the 100th time because other people made changes to fit things they were doing

// I am not an unreasonable person, but if anyone, and I mean ANYONE, ever has need to
// change the code below and/or put ifdefs into it, please, please, PLEASE ask me to do it
// or leave your name here. 

// If this code gets changed without a name being placed here, and the MRU or lastfilesaved 
// stops working as a result, I will compensate by killing everyone, in alphabetical order 
// of surname. Yes, Ben goes first, even though he doesn't touch the code. This is how
// irrational I am feeling on the subject.

J. Schacherl

On a previous project, a colleague inserted a messagebox for our beta testers to track down some rare error condition. It says "If this comes up, please call Eugen at phone xxxxx." Unfortunately he forgot to remove it in release version so every now and then customers called our hotline and asked "WHO is this Eugen and WHY should I call him?!?!" Line in a log file: "Data successfully deleted (hopefully)."

Various

Favourite bad pointer values in hex:

0xbaadf00d
0xBeefBabe
0xfeedface
0xdeadc0de
0xdeadbeef

Pavlos Touboulidis

There's an application that provides free internet access. One time, it hanged so I had to terminate (kill) it. It died ok, but it poped up a MessageBox saying:

Caption: "XXX.exe - ABNORMAL TERMINATION ERROR!!!"

Text: "XXX.exe was forced to terminate...Due to a Hacking Attempt or because of a serious error. If you DID NOT try to CRACK XXX.exe Please Notify XXX Support!!! Else Don't Bother..."

Rick York

I saw one of my all time favorites years ago in Norton's Programming Windows book. It was in the default windows procedure, DefWindowProc. The author used a goto and the target label was :

ICantBelieveIActuallyUsedAGoto

I laughed pretty hard when I saw this.

Greg Strauss:

I once had a manager who had fairly strict on is source code standards. He had even written perl scripts that would walk through source code to find breeches in the "standards".

Once of his pet peeves were variable names that were too long... so I came across some old C++ code with the following variable declaration:

int nThisVariableDoesntDoAnythingButIsOnlyHereToPissOffTheCodePolice = 0;

Richard Cunday:

The strangest comment I ran across, back in my mainframe development days, was the answer to a screen prompted question which an operator would receive after submitting a batch job incorrectly. The screen prompt displayed the following message:

What killed the monkey in "Raiders of the Lost Ark?"

The answer did not appear on the operator screen but in the source code comments. Correct Answer - Bad Date

Dave Goodman:

On an Alpha Micro computer system I once saw the following error message:

It is a definite no-no to run BITMAP as a user command. Your nose will grow, your
lawn will die, your hair will fall out, and your first-born will marry an aardvark. Shame 
on you!

Anonymous contributions:

I was disassmebling some code one time when I came across a very amusing message: "If you can read this then you are too damn inquisitive"

The Lifeboat C compiler on the Apple II would display the following message when there were too many errors:

I'm so confused! Check you source code"

RtroActiv

/**************************
This is a quick hack job
but since I'm leaving in
2 days... have fun.
***************************/

About Chris Maunder

Chris is the founder and site administrator for CodeProject.com. He's been programming in C/C++ for 10 years and Visual C++/MFC for 4 years. His background includes pure and applied mathematics, engineering and physics, and he is currently based in Canberra, Australia.

Click here to visit Chris Maunder's homepage.

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