But the devs who would define SEVENTEEN to be 17 are unlikely to define OTHER_THING at all, since there’s a “perfectly good” macro that evaluates to 17 and avoids hard-coded numbers already. (They might even cite DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself as a misapplied best-practices shibboleth.)
See the (contrived) Declaration of Independence line above. Your editor would dutifully change the date to be off by six hundred years.
Sure, I understand what you mean. To be honest, that sounds like a different issue, one that would arise after additional circumstances took place.
I still stand by my initial comment, that if you had the quick ability to refactor SEVENTEEN at the time this developer committed this, it wouldn't be a very big deal, and this developer could be told that good variable names are important and he wouldn't be stuck as a junior developer forever, lol.
See the (contrived) Declaration of Independence line above. Your editor would dutifully change the date to be off by six hundred years.