What was the strangest coding standard rule that you were forced to follow? [closed]

Answer 1

I worked at a place that had a merger between 2 companies. The 'dominant' one had a major server written in K&R C (i.e. pre-ANSI). They forced the Java teams (from both offices -- probably 20 devs total) to use this format, which gleefully ignored the 2 pillars of the "brace debate" and goes straight to crazy:

if ( x == y ) 
    {
    System.out.println("this is painful");
    x = 0;
    y++;
    }