Inside the OpenSolaris Source Code

An anonymous reader writes "Ten million lines of code and not a single profanity? Is that really possible? Apparently, yes, says OpenSolaris community manager Jim Grisanzio. He said even before Sun filtered the code, it was relatively free of profanity. 'They went through the code for a great many things,' he said, 'and I'm sure they cleaned a word or two. Or three.' But a careful look through the code will reveal some programmers' frustration." From the article: "The most embarassing comment came from a developer of the GRUB project who went only by the name of 'Gord'. 'This function is truly horrid,' he wrote. 'We try opening the device, then severely abuse the GEOMETRY->flags field to pass a file descriptor to biosdisk. Thank God nobody's looking at this comment, or my reputation would be ruined.'"

Comments

Wow

[Fjornir]

Synchronicity strikes again. Profanity in our source code is a huge problem at my company -- and a lot of it we do ship to customers. I've got my list of red flag words in place, but I've been having some pretty serious problems writing an effective filter.

It comes down to: inflected forms and naughty words in other words. For instance if I search for "ass" then I can either have it match too strictly and it will catch "class" and "passed" -- or too loosely and it will not catch "dumbass" and "jackass". Then think of all the -ed and -ing formations and it starts to become more and more of a tricky problem.

Has it been solved already? Googling for a comprehensive profanity dictionary at work is... tricky.