Walt Mankowski on Thu, 30 Dec 1999 15:46:04 -0500 (EST)


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Re: Y2K Fun (fwd)


Our infamous unnamed programmer wrote:

> &KeelOver ("$ErrorCode : Bad Medium or other error. (copy)") if ($returned != 0);

Robert wrote:

> Here's the answer.  He had too much to drink and was going to &KeelOver()....
> No.. wait..  he just got back from a bad psychic (sometimes called a Medium)
> and was trying to contact some long lost relative, but it didn't work.. or
> maybe it did. .Is that why he's Keeling over?

And Mark-Jason wrote
> I think your theory about how he had too much to drink is right on.
> Perhaps `medium' refers to whatever he was drinking.  If the medium is
> `bad' then that could explain the keeling over as well as explaining
> the program itself

I just felt I should point out that Robert and Mark-Jason have done an
amazing job of describing the guy who wrote this.

This, sadly, is typical of the kind of code this guy writes.  There's
just so much wrong I don't know where to begin -- the random mix of
local and global variables ... his strange variable names ... the
inconsistent formatting ... the lack of error checking ... his
construction of a non-unique, variable length datetime stamp ... the
references to the mysterious $returned (another global, and all other
references to it in other parts of the program were commented out).

Sigh.

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