[cjsplat]

While at Sun in the early 2000's, I was part of the due diligence team for an acquisition and had two days to review the entire code base of a 3 year old, 50 person software team.

This was standard practice, and the M&A policies knew that there was no way to actually understand all the code so there was a policy document to describe what to look for.

Of course the red flag things were unexpected 3rd party copyrights and/or license terms in case the code was encumbered.

But "swear words" were on the yellow flag list, in addition to "ToDo", "XXXX", and "Fix Me" types of things.

I remember thinking about places I have been in the past and that the people used those style comments tended to be the better programmers.

I mentioned this to the person leading the evaluation, and was told that point of noticing these kinds of comments was to look a more closely at the nearby code and try to decide if major functionality was missing or being faked.

It all worked out for that acquisition, but I remember being curious about whatever deal had gone bad in the distant past that made them codify this specific practice.