Why is this a thing
Programmer Humor
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
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Thanks, I hate it.
bro what we are devolving
That is C++ levels of "why the fuck did they add that."
I hate this shit being routinely used in PHP. Symfony uses those functional comments for routing, essentially scanning every controller file as text on every visit, to gather the url patterns above functions. Laravel uses Reflection, which is functionally the same thing, to provide arguments to controller functions. Also, kind of related, the project I'm working now has few functions that use backtrace to return different results based on where they are called from. It is indeed very cursed and I'm ripping out any usages of them whenever I see one.
Comment Annotations were a nessecary thing as php did not support a native way to do it. However, since php 8, there is now native attributes.
The best language is complete, succinct, orderly and clear. And never adds a single goddamn thing ever.
This is heresy.
This is an affront to nature. Comments shouldn't even make it past the scanner.
we need a programming horror community for stuff like this
IMO comments should never ever be parsed under any circumstances but I probably don't know enough to really speak on this
Can we just clarify that you mean that comments should never be parsed by the language engine. There are valid annotation systems, but the goal is alway to ensure that one passable can never impact the other.
Imagine if here a comment could create a syntax error! This is even worse for runtime scripting languages like python.
Sure, but let's just clarify that this is someone going out of their way to create this problem, using Python's ability to read it's own code.
Basically, you can load any text file, including a source code file, and do whatever you want with it.
So, a function can be written that finds out whatever's calling it, reads that file, parses the comments, and uses them as values. This can also be done with introspection, using the same mechanism that displays tracebacks.
This isn't standard python. lib
is not in the standard library. Python also doesn't have any special variables where it stores comments, other than __doc__
which stores a docstring. If I had to guess, add
is reading the file/REPL via __file__
.
Is __doc__ storing a comment or just a text string?
It's a string, although sometimes Python conflates the two. The recommended way to make a multi-line comment is to just make a multi-line string and just don't use it.
No, your intuition is correct, this is extremely cursed.
Seen in a C++ code review (paraphrased):
"Why does this break when you add comments in the middle?"
Comments should be removed before shipping.
Python is an interpreted language but for a compiled language absolutely (and obviously).
I guess there could be just a script before deployment.
Well now that causes breakage two dependencies down the line. Good luck with that. 😅
They chose violence.
I assume the people freaking out about how dumb python is didn't bother to read the code and have never coded in python in their life, because the behavior here is totally reasonable. Python doesn't parse comments normally, which is what you'd expect, but if you tell it to read the raw source code and then parse the raw source code for the comments specifically, of course it does.
You would never, ever accidentally do this.
...you'd also never, ever do it on purpose.
yeah frankly this post is borderline misinformation, they specifically import a library to read comments as arguments, it's like redefining keywords in C and complaining about C being dumb
I'm going to say it just is misinformation, if that's what "lib" is here.
Yeah. 'lib' isn't a standard Python library, it's the name of the abomination that this person created. Since python has quite a bit of useful introspection, they can do something like:
- get the stack
- find the exact call to
abomination.add()
- reparse the text of that line, turn the text of the comment into actual numbers, and add them
Now, I don't know if python keeps the comments around, so it may involve getting the filename and line number, reading the file, and manually extracting the comment text from that line.
It's not even actually called lib. The line just straight up isn't in the image "transcribed", and it's from arglib import comment_arguments
in the original code.
Yeah, I gave this one a downvote.
That's disgusting
This is some javascript level shit
It's actually kind of nice to see this as a JS developer.
Not like, "Oh wow this is neat!"
But like, "Finally the golden child, Python, also has some fucked up shit"
checks the community to make sure I'm in programmer humor
Yeah that checks out
Thank you, I hate it
Implementation of the add()
function is here: https://github.com/raldone01/python_lessons_py/blob/main/lib.py
Yup, the function actually goes and finds the code that calls it and parses the comment.
Disgusting.
Every day further from god's light etc...
This does not actually work, right? Right?
they have to import a separate library to do this, it's not a part of standard python, and this post is basically just misinformation
The add()
function (that is available in the source code) basically uses some built in debugging tools to find out where in the code the function is called, and then parses the comment from the file and uses it for adding stuff.
I’ve never tried (becuse why would you…) but something similar can probably be built in any interpreted language
It’s not something Python does by design
I feel sick