Worst Peice of Code in the World

[Phil Martin]

That looks icky all right. But I have seen worse. Much worse. Ever had to maintain C code that was converted from really really old fortran? Space padded fixed length strings to null terminated strings - fun! Generated code is so pretty. Not. :) - Phil

[Member 96]

Hmmm at first glance it's madness, but at second glance perhaps they were debugging or something and looking at it in a debugger ....ahh forget it, no excuse. Probably copied out of a visual designer of some kind.

[sgorozco]

Hi! Yes I agree with your assumptions, I bet the programmer copied the string from a sql editor and used an utility akin to the StringBuilder add-in to produce a formatted string from the clipboard contents... :~ Anyways, I really wouldn't like to be the one maintaining such code! ;P

An interesting form of object-oriented programming: You suggest a novel approach, and watch as the rest of your team objects!

[prst123]

If Babbage was alive today, he would have died again, looking at that code :) lol.

[Marco Turrini]

A few years ago I had the pleasure X| to read a legacy Cobol source code; after many, many pages of interesting code :zzz: :zzz: :zzz: I found this masterpiece: IF PIPPO = 8 OR PIPPO = 8 PERFOM R-A. Looks like it is more obscure and clearer than your SQL code, at the same time! Of course the programmer who wrote this was not in the firm anymore (I'm not sure he was even in this life anymore): after a short briefing we decided the programmer was an insecure guy and wanted to be REALLY sure the variable equalled 8 (of course this code had been in production for several years when I read it). It's been my first experience with fuzzy logic. A few pages later I found another masterpiece IF X = ZERO PERFORM R-CALC ELSE IF X = 1 PERFORM R-CALC ELSE IF X = 2 PERFORM R-CALC ELSE IF X = 3 PERFORM R-CALC ... ELSE IF X = 50 PERFORM R-CALC ENDIF. Variable X could assume only values from 1 (default) to 50, but code tested for value ZERO, and in any case, tested each value and for each value performed routine R-CALC. I thought the programmer was paid by lines of code, but I don't understand why she/he didn't write fifty identical routines R-CALC00, R-CALC01... R-CALC50 to call: I hope she/he had been fired before having the time to do this.

Marco Turrini

[Atli Davidsson]

Uhm... guys... It's calld to Obfuscate... taken from website: "converts the JavaScript source code into scrambled and completely unreadable form, preventing it from analysing and theft" www.javascipt-source.com Have no idea about the SQL injections.. Don't have any experience on obfuscating, but i'd expect the source before obfuscation used injection. Atli:)

[RichardLH]

Hmmm, If you replace the CR/LF/TAB as required you get INSERT INTO Policy ( ProductID, schemeGroupID, CreatedBy ) VALUES ( ", num1, ", ", this.QuoteSelected.SchemeGroupID, ", '", this.CreatedBy, "' ); SELECT @@IDENTITY;" which means it is just an unusual form of 'cut and paste' from a nicely formatted screen layout and applied in a creative way that I had not imagined before (and then compacted in code to make the string simpler for the parser to handle)! Some times the shorter way to do things actually takes longer in its final form.

[RichardLH]

OK - so the 4 spaces I put in place of the tabs got stripped out by the post form - but you get the idea.

[NiteOne]

You are forget the best one of all . Microsoft Windows ME. it was hard to code for and support. NiteOne

[NoCake]

That's pretty awful. My gold standard for vomit-inducing code was a render function written for a game (no names). It was a single function, 3000 lines long, and had "goto" statements jumping into loop and if statement bodies. Nobody but the writer understood it. The game shipped and was moderately successfully, but I could never look at it without thinking of the festering cancer of code lurking at it's heart. -- modified at 11:39 Tuesday 22nd August, 2006: Emphasis added to 'into'. I still can't believe that. I can understand (but not condone) jumping -out- of a loop or if statement... but into one? beggared belief, that did.

[billrad]

Nothing beats C for obfuscation. See link (I hope.) below. http://www0.us.ioccc.org/main.html[^] Bill Raddatz Something wise (hmmm) You can't push on a rope.

[jstaque]

The only really bad thing about this code is using the incorrect insert ID...everything else can be rationally explained (e.g., debug output (as mentioned above)). Generally, those variable names aren't that bad, as they are rarely, if ever, used much after their initial declaration. But I guess it's pretty l33t to make fun of other people's code! I dare say I've seen much worse code...hell, I've written worse myself. :) :sigh:

[ClockMeister]

That kind-of looks like a piece of code that might have been auto-generated by a GUI tool of some kind.

[derry755]

using code to clean the string is more easier than manually moving the dirty code?

Doing is better than saying.