Re^7: Burned by precedence rules (fail() if "false";)

[swampyankee]

No doubt it was originally defined as FOUR = 4, but then somebody was told to change it to 42 or π. This is why I tend to avoid setting constants like THREE = 3. I find it rather annoying to have constants with clear names that lie. After all, complex code is self-obfuscating; it doesn't need any help.

[gwadej]

Something like that.

This is why I started using the term magic constants a few years ago to complement magic literals. Everybody agrees that magic literals in code are a bad idea. But, what happens when the constant you chose to replace is with provides no more meaning or abstraction...magic constant.

A constant like FOUR provides so little information that it would have been better to leave the original literal 4 in the code.