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Aargh, Part One: A Pirate Walks Into A Bar…

  • Artykuł

One of my former housemates was fond of pirate jokes,

as am I. My personal favourite of his was:

A pirate walks into a bar, and the barkeep says "Excuse me, cap'n, but did you know that you've got your ship's wheel stuck in your pantaloons?"

"Aye," says the pirate, "that thing be drivin' me nuts! Aaargh! "

Today: stuff that drives me nuts, part one of an ongoing series which I will continue whenever I'm too busy to write. (Complaining is easy.)

I've reviews a lot of code over the years, most of which was very high quality. But no code is perfect. There are some bad patterns I see over and over again that are easy to fall into but suboptimal in subtle ways. M

ost of this series will apply specifically to COM programming, but I may throw in a few scripting peeves as well.

I have already griped about

smart pointers and bad Hungarian, so I'll give them a miss.

Gripe #1: Too Many Comments

Comments should explain places where the semantics is not obvious from the syntax. Here's some code I found deep in the persistence code of an unnamed Microsoft product:

// Read cItems

CheckHresult( pStm->Read( &cItems, sizeof(LONG), NULL), pStm, IID_IStream );
// Allocate a block which can hold cItems
pItems = new DWORD[cItems];
// Read the block of items
CheckHresult( pStm->Read(pItems, cItems * sizeof(LONG), NULL), pStm, IID_IStream);

Aargh! It's drivin' me nuts!

(Aside: Why no error checking on the new? More on that next time. Also, this reminds me that I want to do a blog on security aspects of serialization code some time.)

Having one comment per line which simply restates the following line in English instead of C++ doesn't help anyone understand the code, it just makes the code longer.

It's worse than that. It dilutes the value of comments -- you should be able to look through a piece of code and find all the really interesting bits by looking for the comments. If there are comments everywhere, 90% of which explain nothing that couldn't be gleaned from reading the code itself then the 10% of the useful comments -- the ones that explain the semantics -- will never be noticed.

Furthermore, comments "go bad" -- when you do this habitually, it is really easy to change the code and forget to change the comments. Then the comments no longer accurately describe how the code is, but rather how it was.

Comments should also be of appropriate size. Here is a fragment of a script I recently code reviewed.

''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
'' DISABLE SCREEN SAVER
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

WScript.Echo "Disabling Screen Saver"
[ then code here that disabled the screen saver ]

OK, I'm reading the code, and I see the line

WScript.Echo "Disabling Screen Saver"

and I can probably guess what the next line of code does without having the five lines above it consumed by comments and whitespace! I want these huge block comments to be catching my eye for really incredibly important stuff. Otherwise, it's just consuming valuable screen real estate, preventing me from getting more semantics-bearing code onto one screen.

Gripe #2: Bad Macros

The sharp-eyed among you will have wondered about the

CheckHresult call above. What the heck is that thing doing? It's turning HRESULTs into exceptions. (More on why that's a bad idea later.)

Unfortunately, it's a macro. Here's some code that I once wrote using this macro, from the aforementioned persistence code. I was adding the ability to save the state in a new format. Does there appear to be anything wrong with it? (

LoadOldFileFormat doesn't return an error, it throws exceptions. LoadNewFileFormat returns an HRESULT.)

if (fOldFileFormat)
LoadOldFileFormat(pStorage);
else if (NULL != pNewStream)
CheckHresult(LoadNewFileFormat(pNewStream), (IPersistStream*)this, IID_IPersistStream);
else

// This file is not in any of our formats.
Throw(E_FAIL);

Imagine my surprise to see that the compiler produces a syntax error when attempting to compile this code.

I didn't write that macro, so I had no idea what it did -- I was

cargo-cult programming! All the other code that returned error codes called this macro, so I figured I should do so as well. Bad developer! No biscuit!

I ran that through the C preprocessor, and take a look at what popped out: (I've added whitespace and removed some cruft for clarity.)

if (fOldFileFormat)
LoadOldFileFormat(pStorage);
else if (0 != pStream)
{
HRESULT _hr;
if ((_hr=LoadNewFileFormat(pXMLStream)) < 0)
Throw(_hr);
} ;
else
Throw(0x80004005L);

The trailing semi effectively terminates the if and the compiler then balks on the else.

Aaaaaargh! It's drivin' me nuts!

If you're going to have macros, don't write them so that they break C++'s lexical semantics in weird, hard-to-track-down ways. Obviously this wasn't intentional, which just makes my point even stronger -- it is very hard to write correct macros, so don't even try. Don't write macros that look like functions, write actual inline functions and let the compiler take care of optimizing them. Inline functions are guaranteed to not have weird lexical side effects that are not apparent from the text.

In this particular case, we have a macro which represents a statement block but can be used like a statement. The correct thing to do given the definition of this macro is to never terminate it with a semicolon, which looks weird -- no one will be able to remember to do the correct thing!

Next time, more on how mixing C++ exception handling and COM programming drives me nuts.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    Man, you have to work at a CMM level 4/5 company! There's usually a lot more comments than code!! And I won´t even get into what we do for documentation...

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    Given that Macros tend to be so evil, you have got to feel sorry for people working with 3rd party macros in languages like POV-RAY SDL (where a macro is the only way to do stuff). What happens in you end up with all these macros that only work inside certain types of functions.
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    You dislike Hungarian notation, ATL and smart pointers, C++ macros ... I'm beginning to doubt you work at Microsoft ;-)

    See this link for more on comments:
    http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$9893
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    How did you get the C preprocessor to expand the macro? Did you use MS VC++?
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    > How did you get the C preprocessor to expand the macro?

    Go "cl.exe /?", look under "preprocessor" and all will be made clear.

    > Did you use MS VC++?

    No, we mostly use GNU C++ at Microsoft. We use redhat linux as the build environment.

    :P

    Silly, of course we use MSVC on the Visual Studio team! In fact, sometimes we "dogfood" it -- we use yesterday's build of MSVC to compile today's bits. You find bugs in the compiler REAL FAST when you do that.
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    You have been Taken Out! Thanks for the good post.
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2004
    The macro may not have been wonderful, but your own code is no better. You have broken the C programmers first rule on if: ALWAYS use the curly braces. If you had done your bit for defensive programming, you would not have had that particular problem.

    if (NULL != pNewStream) {
    CheckHresult(LoadNewFileFormat(pNewStream), (IPersistStream*)this, IID_IPersistStream);
    } else {
    ......


  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2004
    In standard C++, new throws an exception if it fails - it doesn't return null so the code wouldn't need to check the returned value.

    But apart from that I totally agree with you!
  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2004
    > In standard C++, new throws an exception if it fails

    That's the nice thing about standards -- so many to choose from.

    According to my (autographed!) copy of The C++ Programming Language, 2nd edition, page 99:

    "For historical reasons, new simply returns the pointer 0 if it cannot find enough store..."

    and goes on to say that you can certainly define any behaviour you like in the out-of-store handler including throwing exceptions.
  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2004
    [ Waste Book ] 04-06-05