CodeSOD: Three Letter Acronyms, Four Letter Words

Candice (previously) has another WTF to share for us.

We're going to start by just looking at one fragment of a class defined in this C++ code: TLAflaList.

Every type and variable has a three-letter-acronym buried in its name. The specific meaning of most of the acronyms are mostly lost to time, so "TLA" is as good as any other three random letters. No one knows what "fla" is.

What drew Candice's attention was that there was a type called "list", which implies they're maybe not using the standard library and have reinvented a wheel. Another data point arguing in favor of that is that the class had a method called getNumElements, instead of something more conventional like size.

Let's look at that function:

size_t TLAflaList::getNumElements()
{
	return mv_FLAarray.size();
}

In addition to the meaningless three-letter-acronyms which start every type and variable, we're also adding on a lovely bit of hungarian notation, throwing mv_ on the front for a member variable. The variable is called "array", but is it? Let's look at that definition.

class TLAflaList
{
	…
	private:
		TLAflaArray_t mv_FLAarray;
		…
}

Okay, that gives me a lot more nonsense letters but I still have no idea what that variable is. Where's that type defined? The good news, it's in the same header.

typedef std::vector<INtabCRMprdinvusage_t*> TLAflaArray_t;

So it's not a list or an array, it's a vector. A vector of bare pointers, which definitely makes me worry about inevitable use-after-free errors or memory leaks. Who owns the memory that those pointers are referincing?

"IN" in the type name is an old company, good ol' Initrode, which got acquired a decade ago. "tab" tells us that it's meant to be a database table. We can guess at the rest.

This isn't a codebase, it's a bad Scrabble hand. It's also a trainwreck. Confusing, disorganized, and all of that made worse by piles of typedefs that hide what you're actually doing and endless acronyms that make it impossible to read.

One last detail, which I'll let Candice explain:

I started scrolling down the class definition - it took longer than it should have, given that the company coding style is to double-space the overwhelming majority of lines. (Seriously; I've seen single character braces sandwiched by two lines of nothing.) On the upside, this was one of the classes with just one public block and one private block - some classes like to ping-pong back and forth a half-dozen times.

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This post originally appeared on The Daily WTF.