• Derp (unregistered)

    ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;Frist;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; ; ; ; ;; ; ; ;

  • Robert Morson (google)

    As every programmer knows, it's quite annoying when you track down the source of some weird and incomprehensible compiler error, and it is caused by a single, missing semicolon. Clearly this individual was trying to avoid that. As such, I don't see anything wrong with this sample.

  • A_L (unregistered)

    Sleep-coding, or just a really sticky ;-key.

    Really.

    Sticky.

  • coward (unregistered)

    Some kind of attempt at adding a delay? Auto generated code? idk, just jacked up.

  • Someone (unregistered)

    I wonder if the amount of semicolons at the end of each line corresponds to the number following on separate lines.

    My guess is some sort of auto-replace script or find and replace operation taking itself too seriously.

  • DQ (unregistered)

    It's simple: He's payed per LOC

  • Domin Abbus (unregistered)

    Spoiler Alert

  • akozakie (unregistered)

    Truly magnificent cornification, Remy!

  • Vilx- (unregistered)

    I'd love to see the source control history of this file!

  • Uh (unregistered)

    Isn't there a missing semicolon at the end of that function?

  • Kitihounel (unregistered)

    If you add up the time wasted by each reader to reach the end of this article, I think the result won't be less than one day. We should all sue Remi for that...

  • Krzysztof Słychań (google)

    Lessons learned: always lock the screen if you're going AFK and your cat is around :)

  • Dude (unregistered) in reply to Someone

    Doubtful - each block (starting at line 5, 2358 and 4712) has 8987 extra semicolons, followed by 2352 lines of semicolons - a total of 34,017 extra (less the one that's missing at the bottom for some reason).

    The fact that it's identical makes me think it's an auto-gen thing. If it's not, it wouldn't take more than a minute in NP++ to clean it up though.

    Or maybe they're trying to pad the file to be a specific file size. I've heard of stupider things.

  • PJRZ (unregistered) in reply to Krzysztof Słychań

    Nah, my cat wouldn't use semi-colons because he only knows Visual Basic

  • guest (unregistered) in reply to Dude

    A really stupid method of padding the file to get to to a certain size was my first thought.

  • (nodebb)

    I get most of it, but can someone explain what these lines are doing? ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;

    I feel like you could rewrite them as ; ; ;

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to PJRZ

    Can't he use PAWS, then?

  • map (unregistered)

    ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; What? Nobody did it yet...;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;

  • Uncle Al (unregistered)

    I think DQ above is on the right track, sadly. Early in my career, I remember hearing anecdotes from older engineers about working at corporations that decided to count lines of code as a measure of productivity. After everyone started adding additional lines via formatting (e.g. make sure the braces in an if statement got their own lines), they decided to count real lines of code by counting semicolons. One prompt hack that resulted was a search-and-replace where every semicolon at the end of a line was replaced by two semicolons. Unfortunately, the solution turned out to be more rules in the coding standard, rather than rethinking lines of code as a productivity standard.

  • map (unregistered)

    I guess I'm TRWTF for thinking I can get past the comment formatting.

  • Bert (unregistered) in reply to Uncle Al

    Well, yes. If you're trying to measure something and employees are deliberately messing up that measurement, is the answer "stop subordinates meddling with measurements" or "give up and try something else"?

  • Burner (unregistered)

    Auto generated by the IDE?

  • Hello World (unregistered)

    it wouldn't compile ignoring the extra semi-colons and the single missing one that function has two opening curly brackets and three closing ones

  • Mycroft (unregistered) in reply to akozakie

    By "cornification", are you referring to the process by which squamous epithelial cells in vertebrate animals develop into tough protective layers or structures such as hair, hooves, and the outer layer of skin?

    Or am I missing something because I'm not a hipster?

  • Phloog (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that this story crashes my newsreader... :D

  • MrAnderson (unregistered)

    Looks like he was trying to insert a delay before the dropdown and his Google-fu failed him. And/or perhaps his productivity was being measured in LOC or in KB downloaded by users.

    The odd uniformity of the semicolon blocks makes me wonder if somewhere out there he has a conversion 'parsing X empty lines requires Y milliseconds, so I'll use Z sets of them'.

  • Kashim (unregistered) in reply to Bert

    Depends on why your employees are messing with the measurements. The real answer is "Reevaluate why you are measuring the thing you are measuring." If there is a really good reason, then deal with the employees. If, upon learning more about things, you determine that you are measuring something really, really dumb, like Lines of Code, then take the hint that all of your employees seem to know what's up, and find another way.

    I'm curious if this was a test to determine whether the LoC checker was just doing semicolons, or if there had to be line breaks after them. Based upon the amount that he got paid (or amount of LoC reported), he could determine exactly how to best cheat the system. Software Engineering: not just wanting to cheat the system, but wanting to find the mathematically best way to do so. Why include the line breaks if you don't have to? It doubles to quadruples (depending on newline type and whether or not it is tabbed) the size of the file.

  • chreng (unregistered) in reply to akozakie

    +1!

  • Doober (unregistered)

    Man. That is SCARY close to my password.

  • Bonkey (unregistered)

    LOL, 15 years ago performance was sometimes capture in SLOC. Some simple ways to estimate SLOC include things like counting semicolons.

    This guy reported 100s of SLOC per week more than he really wrote according to the standards devised by management. This guy probably got better raises than everyone else to boot.

  • Tim (unregistered)

    Looks like their metric for measuring work are lines of code

  • (nodebb) in reply to Doober

    So your password is ;;;h;;;u;;;n;;;t;;;e;;;r;;;2;;; ?

  • Ex-lurker (unregistered)

    Best hidden cornify ever!

  • Cat Attack (unregistered)

    This is clearly the work of a rogue cat.

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    i remember a weird story where someone had a comment like "..,.,..,.,..,..,..,." it turned out to be a binary representation of her phone number!

  • John (unregistered)

    My guess is that it was trying to overcome the idiotic restriction of MS-IE refusing to serve a web page smaller than 512 characters,

  • John Roth (unregistered)

    I wonder if he had some ASCII art using semicolons that then got standardized by a pretty-print program.

  • The incredible Holk (unregistered)

    Looks like one of blakeyrat's early works, before the discovery of profanity.

  • Herby (unregistered)

    s/;;/;/g

    Most of them.

    The single line ones take some more effort, but should be easier to eliminate as well.

    Unix tools are your friend. Too many semicolons are your enemy. Of course, the problem may be that the guy didn't like semicolons, and had the editor put one in at the end of the line and squashed the text file somehow.

    As mentioned before, we need to see the history one the file to get an actual handle on the "problem".

  • Karl Bielefeldt (github)

    Probably just a setup for a hash collision attack.

  • jp00p (unregistered)

    Could be one of those old-skool methods for obfuscating your source code so other "Webmasters" don't steal it easily.

  • Tim! (unregistered) in reply to Mycroft

    When Remy posts an article, View Source.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Well, obviously this file is "parsed" by an excel spreadsheet. And by "parse" I of course mean "read from constant offsets".

  • Steve (unregistered) in reply to Hello World

    Count again.

  • Mrs Palmer (unregistered) in reply to A_L

    Actually, he clearly was doing something else on his keyboard; which explains the stickiness.

  • Ron Fox (google)

    Paid by the line

  • (nodebb) in reply to Herby

    You mean

    s/;;+/;/g; s/^\s*;\n//gsm;

    First one removes the masses of semicolons on the three long lines and the second one will remove all the semicolons by themselves on a line (with optional whitespace).

    Disclaimer: I've a Perl programmer.

    Addendum 2017-05-05 07:50:

    s/;;+/;/g;
s/^\s*;\n//gsm;
  • Rane2k (unregistered)

    This certainly increases code coverage statistics. ;)

  • (nodebb)

    My first thought, given that the code calculates curleft and curtop, is that he's trying to show, in code, some kind of top/left diagram using the semicolons. Especially with that while obj = obj.parent loop at line ; ;;; ; ;;;

  • Alex (unregistered)

    Must come from a background where you need to leave extra lines so you don't have to change your line numbers for your jumps.

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