[revelation]

The point of this is to make sure you recognize a number as the magic number it is when you see it scrolling by in a debugger. Preprocessor directives have this problem where they don't survive the preprocessor stage.

Its not just a meaningless joke, it has an actual raison d'être. Of course there might be less offending choices, but this hardly ranks among the top of the problems that plague open source development (communities).