What does XXX mean in a comment?

Question

What do people generally mean whenever you see XXX in a comment. Occasionally, I'll see a comment like this:

# XXX - This widget really should frobulate the whatsit

Of course, I can tell what the comment means, but what does the XXX generally mean? Is it saying "This is a hack" or maybe "Perhaps we should revisit this later"? Or is it saying something else entirely?

Answer 1

What XXX represents, depends on the author of the code. In general, it is used as a marker for code that requires attention.

However, this web page states a somewhat different train of thought:

XXX : used to flag something that is bogus but works FIXME : used to flag something that is bogus and broken

I guess this further shows that its meaning is not well defined and is used differently.

Answer 2

It's a dirty piece of code ;)

Answer 3

It means nothing. It's just a sequence of characters that is visually distinctive (which makes it easy to scan for manually) and unlikely to appear in either code or comments (which makes it easy to search for programatically).

So, it is used as a marker to flag comments that need to be easily searchable. Usually, it marks a piece of code that needs to be revisited.

Answer 4

Per Wikipedia: "XXX to warn other programmers of problematic or misguiding code." -- which might be pulled from containers of poison that say "xxx" on them; super old school.

If it's a TODO note, here's a related blog post on it called, TODO or not TODO, which covers using GREP to sort comments by date, owner, etc.

Answer 5

IIRC it is an annotation that predates and has similar meaning to TODO or FIXME annotations. It's quite common in vim's source, for instance.

Answer 6

Xavier Xander Xiang checked in that code and used his initials?

Answer 7

It is most likely a character sequence which does not occur in regular code, meaning that it is easily searchable from a command line:

ravn:tmp ravn$ echo XXXX This is very bad > processor.c
ravn:tmp ravn$ echo XXXX Verify defaults before going in production > main.c
ravn:tmp ravn$ grep -R XXXX .
./main.c:XXXX Verify defaults before going in production
./processor.c:XXXX This is very bad
ravn:tmp ravn$ 

(example is for Unix, I believe "findstr" does the same under Microsoft Windows)

Answer 8

XXX is just there as a marker for easy search.

Answer 9

It could be stylistic, or it could be a way of adding "bookmarks" to code, but it doesn't have any obvious meaning.

Answer 10

It is most probably a marker that can later be found. Unlike TODO or FIXME or the alike, XXX is very rarely found in any word or construct, therefore making it perfect for a marker that will stand alone when files are being searched through.

Answer 11

but what does the XXX generally mean? Is it saying "This is a hack" or maybe "Perhaps we should revisit this later"? Or is it saying something else entirely?

Any of the above.

The choice of XXX versus TODO or FIXME or HACK or something else is not governed by any strong rules or conventions. Basically, it means whatever the person who put it there intended it to mean. It may be obvious ... or it may be totally opaque to you.

Answer 12

Where I am originally from we use XXX (and then YYY, ZZZ) for numbers that we do not know them yet, for example: add XXX to YYY to find the result, then add 10%.

Originates from equations at school where 'x' is the unknown variable.