Coded Smorgasbord: The Saddest Words: What If

Conditional statements, we would hope, are one of the most basic and well understood constructs in any programming language. Hope, of course, is for fools and suckers, so let's take a look at a few short snippets.

Our first installment comes from Jonas.

if (!checkAndDelete(Definitions.DirectoryName, currentTime)); //Empty statement

I appreciate the comment, which informs us that this empty statement is intentional. Why it's intentional remains mysterious.

Jonas found this while going through linter warnings. After fixing this, there are only 25,000 more warnings to go.

Brodey has a similar construct, but from a very different language.

If (Session.Item(Session.SessionID & "Origional") IsNot Nothing) ThenEnd If

I have to give bonus points for the origional spelling of "original". But spelling aside, there's a hint of something sinister here- we're concatenating strings with the SessionId- I don't know what is going wrong here, but it's definitely something.

Our last little snippet comes from Midiane. While not a conditional, it shows a misunderstanding of either booleans or comments.

$mail->SMTPAuth = false; // turn on SMTP authentication

The comment clearly is out of date with the code (which is the main reason we shouldn't repeat what is in the code as a comment). At least, we hope the comment is just out of date. A worse scenario is that setting the flag equal to false enables it.

[Advertisement] Picking up NuGet is easy. Getting good at it takes time. Download our guide to learn the best practice of NuGet for the Enterprise.