On 6/29/07, Michael Rigby-Jones <Michael.Rigby-Jones@bookham.com> wrote:
>
> But it's syntacticly correct, even if it's poor style.  I don't know of a compiler that will complain because a magic number was used instead of a defined symbol.

I never said anything about whether or not it was syntactically
correct. I said it was a more egregious error. In my world, any error
caught by the compiler is trivial, because the code will fail to
build. (This goes for warnings as well.) But this is an error that can
cause severe difficulties, and is not caught by the compiler. If it
gets through the code review, it can take months or years to cause
trouble.

To label it as 'poor style' is to trivialize it, to put it in the same
league as indentation, or whether you put a space after a '('.

If a job applicant, in an interview at my company, wrote some code
that had a syntax error (e.g. an undefined variable) it would not be
cause for alarm. If they wrote code that had magic numbers like this,
they might be shown the door rather quickly.
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