Sabotage the coding standards
C / C++


  Rule 1: octal constants shall not be used
  
  Rationale: octal constants can be a cause of confusion. For example, a
  casual glance over the line 
  const int coefficients[] = {132, 521, 013, 102};
  might miss the fact, that one of the numbers in the array
  is defined in octal.


If you want to be even more evil, add the following:


  Rule 2: hexadecimal constants shall only be used in the context of bit manipulation.
  
  Rationale: If a constant represents a numerical value, it's more
  readable if it's in decimal. A hexadecimal constant should indicate
  that it represents a bit mask, not a numerical value.


How it can be abused:

Take the following simple program which will add the first 10 elements of an array. This code would not be standard-conforming.

sum = 0;
for (i = 0; i &lt; 10; i++) 
{
    sum += array[i];
}



   Note, that 0 is, per definition, an octal constant. Per rule 1, requiring it to be written as 0x00 all through the code is frustrating. Per rule 2, even more frustrating.