C Programmer's Disease

programming The tendency of the undisciplined C programmer

to set arbitrary but supposedly generous static limits on

table sizes (defined, if you're lucky, by constants in header

files) rather than taking the trouble to do proper dynamic

storage allocation. If an application user later needs to put

68 elements into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer

reasons that he or she can easily reset the table size to 68

(or even as much as 70, to allow for future expansion) and

recompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable feeling

of having made the effort to satisfy the user's (unreasonable)

demands, and often affords the user multiple opportunities to

explore the marvellous consequences of fandango on core. In

severe cases of the disease, the programmer cannot comprehend

why each fix of this kind seems only to further disgruntle the

user.

[Jargon File]

(2001-12-31)