Making one value "special"

Posted by SplashHit on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by SplashHit
Published on 2010-12-22T21:24:27Z Indexed on 2010/12/22 21:54 UTC
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refactoring

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code-smell

What is the "computer science" term for the practice of assigning a special meaning to one of a type's values. For example a numeric variable called "amount_to_transfer" where the special value "0" means "entire account balance" or a date value "spouse_date_of_birth" where "1/1/1800" means "unmarried".

I happen to feel that this is quite a bad "smell", but I'd like to have a name for it, and if possible, some blog post or article about why it's bad and how to fix it.

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