I was exploring my company's codebase yesterday and I noticed one class which had three variables named m_p1, m_p2, and m_p3. These variables are used very often in this class and each has a different, specialized type. (By "specialized," I mean something specific like "EmailSender" or "DateFormatter," not something generic like "int" or "std::vector").
I asked a coworker about this and he said this was a security feature: If our code fell into the wrong hands, it would be harder for a hacker to understand. Thus, our code is more secure.
My first response is that this does make our code harder to understand, but it's only a very minor inconvenience from a hacker's perspective and a minor, but constant, inconvenience for the developers working on the code. This behavior is actually only limited to two classes I could find, so it seems very half-heartedly implemented. I can work around the odd variable names and just try to memorize what corresponds to what, but I'm looking for others' perspective on this issue. Am I underestimating the security benefits or failing to think of something?
EDIT:
Thanks to the comments, I've discovered this question is off-topic for this site. That lead me to look for where it would be on-topic, and I found Security.StackExchange. Furthermore, I found this question which appears to be a near-duplicate of mine. The general consensus is that it does provide some security, but it should not be counted on and confusion to programmers should be considered.
I'm sorry to be off-topic.
