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Comment by tomn | Hacker News Reader

This is what comments were made for!

I'm sure it's legitimate, but you'd have to be insane to look at that code and not question why it exists.

For the late-comers (like me!), Javadoc comments were added since the parent comment was posted:

  $ svn log -r {2010-11-30}:HEAD http://svn.codehaus.org/groovy/trunk/groovy/groovy-core/src/main/org/codehaus/groovy/runtime/ArrayUtil.java
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
  r21150 | hamletdrc | 2010-11-30 19:32:11 +0100 (Tue, 30 Nov 2010) | 3 lines
  
  updated javadoc on arrayutil
  
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
  r21152 | hamletdrc | 2010-11-30 21:31:24 +0100 (Tue, 30 Nov 2010) | 1 line
  
  Updated ArrayUtil javadoc one more time so that people quite wondering what it is used for.

One could also say you'd have to be sophomoric to assume the person who put if there didn't do so for a good reason.

As I said, I'm sure that it's legitimate, but it's definitely not good code, and I'd rather not have it lurking in my codebase for years on end. If you don't know the original motivation behind writing something like that, you can't really remove it for fear of the original bug cropping up again without you noticing.

(I guess, then this is also what test cases are for...)

A coding comment could say why 250 was chosen, and not 256, or Scala's 22 for max tuple sizes.

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