The Daily WTF

Let’s simply start with some code, provided by Adam:

static bool Failed(bool value) { return value; }

Now, you look at this method, and you ask yourself, “what use is this?” Well, scattered through the codebase, you can see it in use:

bool bOK; bOK = someProcessWhichMightFail(); return bOK ? true : Failed(false);

Adam went through the commit history and was able to get a sense of what the developer was actually trying to do. You see, in some places, there are many reasons why the call might fail. So by wrapping a method around the kind of failure, you had a sense of why it failed, for example, it could be return bOK ? true : FILE_NOT_FOUND(false);

Now, you know why it failed. Well, you know why if you read the code. As this is C++, one could have communicated failure states using exceptions, which

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