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Line Break column

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 1:19 am
by quantus
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/10/line_break_ep2/
We'll crack on with this appetizing anecdote sent in by Ian:

A long time ago I was working on the driver for a touchscreen controller chip. This driver was supplied to our customers as sample source code which they then incorporated into their product.

One part of the touchscreen controller code detected whether the stylus (pen) is touching the screen (down) or not (up) to determine whether to send points to the operating system. I was updating the end-of-scribble detection code, and decided to change a variable name before it went to customers. I reordered the words in it to isPenUp. I'll leave it to you work out the original variable name.

Well done, Ian, for avoiding that cockup. Lesson: It's said that there are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. 'nuff said.
If it slipped through, I guess it would've been a 3rd hard thing...