When we share code comments, it's usually because they demonstrate some lack of awareness or some carelessness about what's going on. A comment warning "I know I shouldn't do this" or a comment that contradicts the code in a funny way, that's usually what we share.
But today's submission, from Dewey, is a bit different. Dewey wrote the comment, and it was in preparation for some serious refactoring. So this comment is the product of someone spending time to accurately analyze and understand a method, documenting its behavior, and explaining it so the code could be changed to something better. The WTF here isn't the comment, but the code it describes.
/** Get the field value, stripped of accelerator key information while
side-effecting some global variables that affect the way
@link #setAcceleratorMnemonic(JMenuItem)} behaves in subsequent calls.
...
*/
"while side-effecting some global variables" is exactly the kind of thing you want to see in a code comment. Well, maybe not, but it's the kind of thing I like to see when trawling through submissions.
It took Dewey thirty minutes and a careful trace through three different methods to be able to understand the code well enough to write this.
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This post originally appeared on The Daily WTF.