The Daily WTF

Valencia made a few contributions to a large C++ project run by Harvey. Specifically, there were some pass-by-value uses of a large data structure, and changing those to pass-by-reference fixed a number of performance problems, especially on certain compilers.

“It’s a simple typo,” Valencia thought. “Anyone could have done that.” But they kept digging…

The original code-base was indented with spaces, but Harvey just used tabs. That was a mild annoyance, but Harvey used a lot of tabs, as his code style was “nest as many blocks as deeply as possible”. In addition to loads of magic numbers that should be enums, Harvey also had a stance that “never use an int type when you can store your number as a double”.

Then, for example, what if you have a char and you want to turn the char into a string? Do you just use the std::string() constructor that

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