Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Linux Kernel Code Humor

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the this-source-rated-t-for-teen dept.

An anonymous reader writes "This article points to some pretty funny comments and code in the Linux kernel. From colorful metaphors, to burning printers, to happy meals... A recursive search through the entire code base reveals some interesting language. Is all code like this?"

4 of 485 comments (clear)

  1. Google Cache by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Linked off of article here.

    Easier to read too.

  2. Re:Is all code like this? by KMitchell · · Score: 5, Informative
    Um, I have to disagree with this. It really depends on the shop. If by professional you mean formal code reviews by peers, perhaps that would limit some of this stuff. Knowing that you have to stare down a bunch of co-workers is a pretty good way to cause self-censure. Even then it really depends on the attitudes of the people that are going to be looking at your code. Some groups are really anal about comments and others couldn't care less if the code works.


    Now when the customers SEE these msgs, you really get to see what kind of company you work for... at a former gig we had a debug mechanism which caused a debug msg to be displayed when the program crashed in in debug mode. Theory was, the customer would never see these msgs but they were helpful for debugging. Some customer happened to run "strings" on the executable and since they're compiled (unlike comments), got to see a whole lot of messages along the lines of "we should never get here" etc. Kind of funny, really. The customer thereafter put out an anual list of interesting strings found in the program and everyone got a chuckle out of it. None of my comments ever made the list tho ;)

  3. Re:Variable Names too.... by __past__ · · Score: 4, Informative
    Not to mention the unheard cries of thousands of VB code monkeys:

    On Error GoTo Hell

    Or in general

    GoTo ConsideredHarmful

    GNU has a whole page with (more or less) funny variable names

    --
    Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
  4. Re:Funny comments from other systems by taniwha · · Score: 4, Informative
    but the funny thing was that it made lots of sense .... I did a V6 port (a long time ago and to the Vax no less) and worried about that line over and over again ..... I'd keep coming back to it and puzzle and worry over it .... one day I got there and it made absolute sense .... I'd won! .....

    Basicly what was going on was that fork() internally was a routine [newproc()] that returned 1 or 0 depending on whether you were the parent or the child .... and one of two things happened ... either you had enough memory, allocated it, copied the parent, and fudged up a return stack in the child to get back to return 0 (or 1 I forget which). But if you didn't have enough ram you'd swap out the parent and dummy up the swapped out image as the child, and set this bit in the process state saying you needed to return from newproc() somewhere in the swapper - which is why this comment was there - suddenly in the middle of a routine that returns no value it would test a flag, fudge the stack and return '1'.