C Programmer's Disease

C Programmer's Disease

(programming)The tendency of the undisciplined C programmerto set arbitrary but supposedly generous static limits ontable sizes (defined, if you're lucky, by constants in headerfiles) rather than taking the trouble to do proper dynamicstorage allocation. If an application user later needs to put68 elements into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmerreasons that he or she can easily reset the table size to 68(or even as much as 70, to allow for future expansion) andrecompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable feelingof having made the effort to satisfy the user's (unreasonable)demands, and often affords the user multiple opportunities toexplore the marvellous consequences of fandango on core. Insevere cases of the disease, the programmer cannot comprehendwhy each fix of this kind seems only to further disgruntle theuser.