Someone has probably pointed this out already, but since the end result of this function is that the list is emptied, there's no need to remove one element at a time. So instead:

foreach (double temp in fakeList)
{
// do something
}

fakeList.RemoveAll();

But then, I don't have a C.S. degree...

Honestly, no matter how bad or well written it is, all objective C code looks like a coding horror to me. But I suppose this looks worse then most.

I like that one, actually. The worst error message IMO remains "Abort, Retry, Fail?"

job security?

It looks to me like the author knew that they were writing bad code, and tried to hide the fact that they were using globals, which just made it all that much worse. But we all had to start somewhere. Slapping a poorly written function over the global accessor could be an evolutionary step towards a static class interface that properly encapsulates the data.

I don't know what language that's in, but I'm wondering if relying on the side-effects of assigning a member to itself is a good idea. A compiler (assuming this is compiled code) might reasonably optimize that away. However, you have to like the comment!