I’ve been going through a lot of the 3 million lines of Anarchy Online code the past months, and seen several bits that make me, as a programmer, laugh. These are completely unfunny for non-programmers, of course. And they aren’t representative for most of the AO code, because that runs pretty well these days.

Here’s a good one, from the just-in-case department:

return this?m_nValue:0;

Found the same one in the Miranda MSN plugin. Note the informative comment.

  if ( this == NULL )  // :)
    return 0;

Then there’s the gratuituos memory leak (props to André who showed me this one today):

void foo(const char * s, int v, std::map& amap) {
  char * p = strcpy(malloc(sizeof(s)+1), s);
  amap[p] = x;
}

Here’s a redundancy that I wasn’t certain about, but I checked the standard, delete NULL is allowed:

if (p) delete p;

My favourite though:

void foo(int i) {
  char b[11];
  sprintf(b, "%d", i);
 ...
}

This bombed. Signed integers require 12 chars to represent, including the trailing space. But that’s not the funny part. The funny part is that I checked who did it, and it turns out the previous person that touched the code must have found a similar error. The diff he comitted was this:

- char b[10];
+ char b[11];

How long should we wait?

WaitForSingleObject( MyThread_c::GetInstance()->m_hThread, INFINITE ); // wait max 2 seconds

Like I said, none of this is funny if you’re not a programmer. And I probably forgot some of the better ones. So, have you got any code stories of your own?