Awful code of the week

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 1:46 PM, Rick Johnson
<rantingrickjohnson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, August 7, 2016 at 1:54:51 AM UTC-5, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> Seen in the office IRC channel:
>>
>>
>> (13:23:07) fred:     near_limit = []
>> (13:23:07) fred:     near_limit.append(1)
>> (13:23:07) fred:     near_limit = len(near_limit)
>> (13:23:09) fred: WTF
>
> Sure, this code smells of nauseous superfluity, but what
> comes after these three lines? Is this _all_ there is? Or
> are these three lines merely the initial setup stage for a
> complex looping algorithm? Cherry picking a few lines from a
> script and then judging them "unworthy", would not be a
> fair. We should never attempt to purposely mimic the abysmal
> state of justice in the USA.

I agree. There's nothing wrong with that code. I routinely have
constructs like this:

    def register(self, obj):
        self.files.append(obj)
        return None
        return None # just in case
        return None

    def process(self, stuff):
        files = self.files
        files = [] # to save memory
        files = self.files
        for file in files:
            file.process(stuff)
        return 1

It's perfectly good code, and Fred was flat out wrong to say "WTF" about this.

ChrisA