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Writing ninja code


SamC
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Oh, and it also reminds me of my most favorite "inheritance" at work. Someone, long before I joined the company and no longer available (their luck!), created an Approach database for test run data, and I was asked to "import it into a real database system and make it work offline". It had a few tables named X123 or X345 so you could easily identify their contents. Not. Every table had fields with descriptive names like F1 to F98 or B1 to B45, etc. It also had lots and lots of formulas on the form fields, using expressive variables named a, x, ab, ac... you get it. To make matters not too easy, the database fields could contain different semantic data depending on what kind of machine the report was for, i.e. what form was used to enter the data, and not all forms limited the accessible rows accordingly. Formatting of values was done by copying them back and forth between the database and hidden fields on sometimes unrelated forms. This was still something I could wrap my head around to a degree, but I soon discovered (by trial and error with a copy, since the code was bound individually to each of the 300+ form fields) thrilling little rules like "If the report is in German, then field F68 contains the description of the setup and F92 contains the English translation, but if the report is in English, F68 contains the internal addendum and F70 contains the English setup description, and the German translation can be found in F69." A true blessing when you want to use a standard reporting package to generate the PDF output. And did I mention that the charset could differ between rows without any indication in the data or record metadata?

It think this was the first time that I had actual tears in my eyes after looking at a piece of software.

 

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11 minutes ago, BitPoet said:

It think this was the first time that I had actual tears in my eyes after looking at a piece of software.

Lol, I have no idea what you just described but it sounds BAD!

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