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Comment by pdpi | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago I worked on a project that had a hard “no hard coded values” rule, as requested by the customer. The team routinely wrote the equivalent to

    const char_a = “a”;

And I couldn’t get my manager to understand why this was a problem.

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Clearly it is still a hardcoded value! It fails the requirement. Instead there should be a factory that loads a file that reads in the "a" to the variable, nested down under 6 layers of abstraction spread across a dozen files.

thats too enterprisey, at a startup you would write it like this:

const charA = (false+"")[1];

That has three constants.

is this better?

const charA = (![]+[])[+!+[]];

[] is still a constant.

True, but we can both agree that this is a better constant than "a". Much better job security in that code.. unless you get fired for writing it, that is

I cannot even parse this. What is going on here?

Saw this just the other day. I was at a loss to know what to say. :(

This gets to intent.

What, in the code base, does char_a mean? Is it append_command? Is it used in a..z for all lowercase? Maybe an all_lowercase is needed instead.

I know that it's an "A". I don't know why that matters to the codebase. Now, there are cases where it is obvious to even beginners, and I'm fine with it as magic characters, but I've seen cases where people were confused to why 1000 was in a `for(int i = 0; i<1000; i++)`. Is 1000 arbitrary in that case, or is it based on a defunct business requirement in 2008? Will it break if we change it to 5000 because our computers are faster now?

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