The origins of XXX as FIXME
Personally, I can't stand XXX as a comment prefix. It is semantically null as far as I am concerned. Just looking through the comments here shows several different possible meanings: FIXME, HACK, TODO. But I've seen it alongside all of FIXME, HACK, NOTE, TODO, BUG, ATTN, as a complete separate and distinct type of comment prefix.<p>Is it an actionable indicator or a explanatory indicator? What is its relative priority or importance among the others?<p>At least with all the other prefixes I listed it is dead clear what is actionable and what is explanatory. Better still there is an obvious priority albeit slightly ambiguous. Is TODO a higher priority than FIXME? But that can be addressed in a section of the README if necessary.<p>The other problem is allowing XXX in the code base allows for a catchall cop-out. Instead of giving the comment some semantic meaning just use XXX and let somebody else figure it out. That somebody could even be you in a few years. In one particular code base that had a few other prefixes the XXX were by far the dominate prefix, presumable because of a catchall cop-out slippery slope.<p>In any case, I think XXX should be dropped in favor of prefixes with some semantic meaning.