devgrind » delphi http://devgrind.com thinking outside the { } Tue, 04 May 2010 17:25:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Sneaky Snippets (1): Infinity http://devgrind.com/2007/03/06/sneaky-snippets-1-infinity/ http://devgrind.com/2007/03/06/sneaky-snippets-1-infinity/#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2007 06:29:25 +0000 Arne http://devgrind.com/2007/03/06/sneaky-snippets-1-infinity/ I found this beaut in a Delphi system I co-wrote while studying:

const
  UNENDLICH = 99999999;

Please note that (in this case) unendlich is the german counterpart for infinity.

This looks worse than it actually was. The system was an LL(1) parser generator and in order to increase performance we used fixed-length arrays for all kinds of collections, and we had to set a maximum upper bound for array indices. Maybe we shouldn’t have called it infinity, though.

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