`three = 1` in the Linux sourcecode (2014)
Many years ago in an age of klocs and flowcharts, at a large three-letter computer company, there were iron-clad coding rules that must be obeyed, no questions allowed. In general you could see their reasoning, but such bureaucratic reasoning doesn't pay off.<p>One example of this was that all numeric values used in a program <i>must</i> be factored out as symbolic constants. The reason for doing this is obvious, but it failed to account for the fact that some numbers have intrinsic meaning that should allow their use directly. But to be compliant with the standard, our C code had this boilerplate up near the top:<p><pre><code>  #define zero 0
  #define one  1
</code></pre>
This, of course, only served to make every page of code harder to read. And it didn't <i>really</i> even solve the problem it was meant to. We once found in some source code:<p><pre><code>  #define thirteen 13
</code></pre>
which of course did nothing to show us <i>why</i> that particular value was relevant.