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Code Snippet Of the Day (CodeSOD) features interesting and usually incorrect code snippets taken from actual production code in a commercial and/or open source software projects.
If there's one thing worse in code than magic numbers, it's magic strings. Sean inherited an antique Visual C++ application, and the previous developers were very careful to make sure every string was a named constant.
Sep 22const char $$B[] = "$$B";
const char $$E[] = "$$E";
const char $$L[] = "$$L";
const char $$IN[] = "$$IN";
const char $$OUT[] = "$$OUT";
const char $CODE[] = "$CODE";
const char $ENDE[] = "$ENDE";
As a general rule of thumb, when you see a class called StringConverter you know something is going to be wrong in there. That's at least what Erik thought when examining a bug in a totally different section of string handling code that just happened to depend on StringConverter.
StringConverter might sound like some sort of utility belt class with a huge pile of methods in it, but no- it's only got two. So we should take a look at both.