The Daily WTF

It’s fair to say that regardless of their many advantages, “systems languages”, like C, are much harder to use than their more abstract cousins.Vendors know this, which is why they often find a way to integrate across language boundaries. You might write critical functions in C or C++, then invoke them in Python or from Swift or… Visual Basic 6.

And crossing those language boundaries can pose other challenges. For example, Python has a built-in boolean type. C, for quite a long time didn’t. Which means a lot of C code has blocks like this:

#define BOOL int #define FALSE 0 #define TRUE 1 #define FILE_NOT_FOUND 2

Carl C provides that block, just for illustration purposes. Awhile back, he inherited a big pile of antique COM+ and the associated VB6 front end, along with a herd of “COM Wizards” and “Junior VB Programmers” to help maintain it.

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