The Old New Thing

Introducing the for-if anti-pattern

December 27, 2011 Dec 27, 2011 12/27/11

Raymond Chen

Over the years, I've seen a bunch of coding anti-patterns. I figured maybe I'll share a few. Today, I'll introduce what I'm calling the for-if anti-pattern, also known as "We'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge." This is a special case of the for-case anti-pattern, where all but one of the cases is null. This can ...