Many many years ago, when I took my first programming course in high school, our instructor had… opinions. One of those opinions was that you should manually syntax check your code and not rely on compiler errors, because back in her day, you had to punch your program into cards, drop it off in the computer lab, wait for the technician to run your batch, and then pick up the results on the printer. It needed to work the first try or you might be waiting a whole day before you could try again.

One of her other opinions was that your code should contain as many comments as it contained lines of code. Everything needed comments. Everything. Which brings us to this code from Doug.

Private Sub BuildActuarial04_14Row(exportString As StringBuilder, record As ap_Actuarial04_14_Result)
      'Card Type
      exportString.Append(record.CardType)
      'SSN
      exportString.Append(record.SSN)
      'Name
      exportString.Append(helper.FormatData(record.Name, 25, Helpers.DataType.StringFormat))
      'Sex
      exportString.Append(record.Sex)
      'Birth Date
      exportString.Append(record.BirthDate)
      'Hire Date
      exportString.Append(helper.FormatData(record.HireDate, 8, Helpers.DataType.StringFormat))
      'Plan Number
      exportString.Append(record.PlanNumber)
      'Parish Or Other Codes 1
      exportString.Append(record.ParishOrOtherCodes1)
      'Parish Or Other Codes 2
      exportString.Append(record.ParishOrOtherCodes2)
      'Service Code
      exportString.Append(record.ServiceCode)
      'Years Of Eligible Service
      exportString.Append(record.YearsOfEligibleService)
      'Years Of Credited Service
      exportString.Append(record.YearsOfCreditedService)
      'Final Average Compensation Monthly
      exportString.Append(record.FinalAverageCompensationMonthly)
      'Annual Member Contributions For Fye
      exportString.Append(record.AnnualMemberContributionsForFye)
      'Accumulated Member Contributions
      exportString.Append(record.AccumulatedMemberContributions)
      'Contribution Interest
      exportString.Append(record.ContributionInterest)
      'Termination Date
      exportString.Append(record.TerminationDate)
      'Rehired
      exportString.Append(record.Rehired)
      'Ibo
      exportString.Append(record.Ibo)
      'Retirement Date
      exportString.Append(record.RetirementDate)
      'Estimated Accrued Benefit
      exportString.Append(record.EstimatedAccruedBenefit)
      'Original Retirement Benefit
      exportString.Append(record.OriginalRetirementBenefit)
      'Option Code
      exportString.Append(record.OptionCode)
      'Retirement Code
      exportString.Append(record.RetirementCode)
      'Sex Of Beneficiary
      exportString.Append(record.SexOfBeneficiary)
      'Beneficiary Birth Date
      exportString.Append(record.BeneficiaryBirthDate)
      'Childs Monthly Benefit
      exportString.Append(record.ChildsMonthlyBenefit)
      'Childs Birth Date
      exportString.Append(record.ChildsBirthDate)
      'Years Of Military Service
      exportString.Append(record.YearsOfMilitaryService)
      'Beneficiarys SSN
      exportString.Append(record.BeneficiarysSSN)
      'Total Accumulated Years Of Service Purchased
      exportString.Append(record.TotalAccumulatedYearsOfServicePurchased)
      'End Line
      exportString.AppendLine()
    End Sub

Doug's co-worker may have been in my high school class.

What's particularly ironic about this overcommenting is the method name: BuildActuarial04_14Row. What does the 04_14 mean? Why does this merit its own code path? Is that a date? A special internal code? Are there 05_14 rows?

There's a big code smell on that part, because it implies a whole suite of ap_Actuarial…Result classes that probably have the same fields, but don't have the same interface, and someone hacked together this private polymorphism.

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