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

Answer 1

An externally-written C coding standard that had the rule 'don't rely on built in operator precedence, always use brackets'

Fair enough, the obvious intent was to ban:

a = 3 + 6 * 2;

in favour of:

a = 3 + (6 * 2);

Thing was, this was enforced by a tool that followed the C syntax rules that '=', '==', '.' and array access are operators. So code like:

a[i].x += b[i].y + d - 7;

had to be written as:

((a[i]).x) += (((b[i]).y + d) - 7);