One of the big pieces of advice about using exceptions and errors is that they shouldn't be used for flow control. You catch an exception when an exceptional event happens, but you don't, for example, throw an exception to break out of a loop.

Unless you're Python, which throws exceptions to break out of loops. That's just how iteration works. But we're not here to talk about Python.

Alex sends us some Objective-C code which… well, let's just say that the code is suspicious looking, but there's nothing clearly bad about it.

+(const char*)st:(NSArray*)a a:(int)i
{
    @try
    {
        return ([a objectAtIndex:i]==[NSNull null])?"":[[a objectAtIndex:i]UTF8String];
    }
    @catch (...)
    {
        return "";
    }
}

Some time ago, Will started a new job- a four month contract to take an old, ugly DOS application and turn it into a new, shiny VisualBasic 6 application. "And," the new boss explained, "the new program is almost done anyway. It's just that the last guy left, so we need someone to take it over the finish line."

A key feature was that it needed to be able to fetch PDF files stored on a shared network drive. The order numbers were serialized, but the PDFs themselves were organized by year, creating file paths like I:\ORDLOG\2007\172.pdf. Now, in this particular block of code, one had access to both the ordnum and the ordyear, so constructing this path could be a trivial exercise. The previous developer did not take the trivial path, though.

It's bad news when you inherit a legacy PHP CMS. It's worse news when you see that the vast majority of the files were last changed in 2002 (of course there's no source control).

That is the unfortunate position that Elda found herself in.

Alexandar works with a veteran software architect. It's important to note here that a veteran is someone who has had experience. It certainly doesn't mean that they learned anything from that experience.

This veteran was given a task to write a C# method to populate a user's news feed. The goal was to find the five most recent news articles and add them to the list. Now, this is a large scale CMS, so those articles need to be fetched from ElasticSearch.

Years ago, Aleshia W started a job in a VB.Net shop. There's a lot I could say about those kinds of environments, but I'd really just be padding out the article, so let's just get right to the code- which pads out a Year string.

Protected Function YearPadText(ByVal val As String) As String
    Dim valLen As Integer
    valLen = val.Len

    Select Case valLen
        Case 1
            val = val + "              "
        Case 2
            val = val + "             "
        Case 3
            val = val + "            "
        Case 4
            val = val + "           "
        Case 5
            val = val + "          "
        Case 6
            val = val + "         "
        Case 7
            val = val + "        "
        Case 8
            val = val + "       "
        Case 9
            val = val + "      "
        Case 10
            val = val + "     "
        Case 11
            val = val + "    "
        Case 12
            val = val + "   "
        Case 13
            val = val + "  "
        Case 14
            val = val + " "
    End Select
    Return val
End Function

Last week, we took a look at a hash array anti-pattern in JSON. This week, we get to see a Python version of that idea, with extra bonus quirks, from an anonymous submitter.

In this specific case, the code needed to handle CSV files. The order of the columns absolutely matters, and thus the developer needed to make sure that they always handled columns in the correct order. This led to code like this: