[mannykannot]

If it is a general principle, then would one not expect it to apply in this case? More importantly, this is not a corner case; situations where there are specific conventions and protocols that have to be handled consistently in various cases are extremely common in software. It is also not uncommon to see optimized code that is much easier to understand when it is explained as a modification of a simpler implementation.

With regard to the sample, then if that is your experience, I cannot deny it, but, irritating as it may be, it seems fairly harmless. It appears to date from a time when it was thought that extremely prescriptive coding style standards was the way to fix programming - an even less realistic belief than the idea that code can be entirely self-documenting.