...wow.

NFW?

That's weird - it's all I could say too: "Wow..."

Wow.



Who typed it all in the first time? The next patient over in the Carpal Tunnel Ward?

Easy, just rewrite it in VB with optional parameters.

Then start the long hard road to building it right.

Jonathan

Or I guess you could just use param arrays.

FIST!

Ooooh my good, that's just so exceptionally horrendous I can't feel the need to run manically around on the street screaming! Didn't they hear of the "params" keyword? And what even made them *think* of such a function in the first place?!?

Alex Papadimoulis:

/* adds up all the column values for a specific row from an excel file.

 * 20050823 - BSR - v1.0 - Adds only columns a to z.

 * 20050909 - BSR - v2.0 - Added support for adding columns aa to zz.

* 20060718 - Mike - v3.0 - Added support for adding columns aaa to zzz.
*/

Anonymous:

Easy, just rewrite it in VB with optional parameters.

Then start the long hard road to building it right.

Jonathan

How about a Perl script to generate all 600+ variants? Think of the productivity! ("I wrote over 15000 lines of code in one day!")

I can only see one possible solution:

Step one: rm -fr /
Step two: "Hey, boss... I quit"

"The goggles..."

Fortunately there are no triple-letter columns in Excel (at least for now). This puts a natural limit of sorts on this.

Anonymous:

FIST!

Ooooh my good, that's just so exceptionally horrendous I can't feel the need to run manically around on the street screaming! Didn't they hear of the "params" keyword? And what even made them *think* of such a function in the first place?!?

This sort of says "intern" to me. (And yes, there are good ones too.)

This is completely insane!  I would say that I would have to take over design, or quit.

The "right" way to do it (in C, C++, or Objective C) would be make it variadic. For ten lines you could fix everything.

A classic.  Wow.  speechless.  A WTF on so many levels. 

What is really funny is that in order to call this function, someone must have learned how to use the Excel object model to get the values from the worksheet .... but aparently they learned only the absolute minimum to get the job done  (probably the Worksheet.Cells(x,y) method which can return a single-cell Range from a row/column).  

Aaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeegggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh !

Wait for it - add additional overloads to add all permutations of cells for all permutations of multiple rows

Anonymous:

The "right" way to do it (in C, C++, or Objective C) would be make it variadic. For ten lines you could fix everything.

I sure hope that's a joke ... the "right" way to do it (in *any* language that supports COM) is to pass in a single Range object and to enumerate the Cells and add them up ... or a worksheet object and a row # ...   Or, just use a simple Excel function to do the math !!   I hear that the latest versions of Excel support formulas!

seems like it'd be a trivial matter to write a perl script to generate all the functions you need.

i'd do that, and *then* quit.

So, what's everybody's favorite part of this? Mine is,

/* adds up all the column values for a specific row from an excel file.

No. No it does not. It adds up 600+ integers typed in by another hamsterwheel employee. It does nothing with any Excel file.

They appear to just be storing column values as ints.  Why not just chop this bad boy down and use a hashtable?  Iterate it in the method and handle things accordingly.  It's still one ugly mofo, but that would be a step in the right direction.

Anonymous:

They appear to just be storing column values as ints.  Why not just chop this bad boy down and use a hashtable?  Iterate it in the method and handle things accordingly.  It's still one ugly mofo, but that would be a step in the right direction.

Or, just use the Excel object model ????  Or would that be too easy?

I personally love the reserved word escaping:

_as
_do
_is

Thankfully pi isn't one--it's System.Math.PI

And params arrays are probably the best bet for fixing the original problem, but that's just a stopgap.  I can't really think of a better way because I haven't done Excel Interop (and now I just jinxed myself, sigh)

This code is NSFW.

3"Hm, I wonder what is that 'array' thing I keep hearing about..."

By the way, I think this is the first time when the cries about something (this thing doesn't even deserve to be called 'code') being generated might be true 3

create overloads for the following function so that developers don't
need use zeros if they don't need all of the 600+ parameters ..

I can see intellisense just crapping itself over this one.

When I saw this, my response was, literally,

D:

hint: (tilt your head 90 degrees clockwise)

Alex Papadimoulis:

/* adds up all the column values for a specific row from an excel file.

I totally agree with this. You can't trust Excel to calculate the numbers of a single row... What does Excel even know about math! Better to do it yourself...

Anonymous:

They appear to just be storing column values as ints.  Why not just chop this bad boy down and use a hashtable?  Iterate it in the method and handle things accordingly.  It's still one ugly mofo, but that would be a step in the right direction.

I'd say from my experience that in C# you can get a DataTable from excel file in umm 3 lines and then add it up in 2 more lines :) Thus cutting over 100 lines of this craptastic solution to mere 5 lines :)

Anonymous:

Anonymous:

They appear to just be storing column values as ints.  Why not just chop this bad boy down and use a hashtable?  Iterate it in the method and handle things accordingly.  It's still one ugly mofo, but that would be a step in the right direction.

I'd say from my experience that in C# you can get a DataTable from excel file in umm 3 lines and then add it up in 2 more lines :) Thus cutting over 100 lines of this craptastic solution to mere 5 lines :)

And thus, you have created your own WTF.  Congratulations!

Oh my... GOD... it's BURNING... ...my... my EYES... *STUMBLE* ... it's SO... oh MY... AAAAHHHGGGHHH... i can't... no... this is... this is not... real... no... NO... NOOO..*VOMIT*ON*FLOOR* ... *heavy*breathing* *CRY*

/* adds up all the column values for a specific row from an excel file.

Um. Wow.  Dear gods, why would anyone write a function to do this that requires each value to be a parameter?  Can't they just pass the row they want and iterate through, accumulating the total, and substituting a zero when there's a null/empty-string value?

Whoever thought this was the right approach should be drawn and quartered.

int _as
int _do

At least he has avoided keyword ambiguity!

I've been reading this site for over a year now and that might be the most appalling wtf I have seen.

Alex Papadimoulis:

...create overloads for the following function so that developers don't need use zeros if they don't need all of the 600+ parameters ...

I thought Excel was restricted to 256 columns (IV, or 2^8) and 65536 rows (or 2^16) per workbook.  I'm not sure what the workbook limitation is.

At least that's the way it is in Excel 2002, from what I can tell.

Would that be the real WTF, perchance?


doug.

CAPTCHA == 'hacker'
# Sweet!

Alex Papadimoulis:

/* adds up all the column values for a specific row from an excel file.

 * 20050823 - BSR - v1.0 - Adds only columns a to z.

 * 20050909 - BSR - v2.0 - Added support for adding columns aa to zz.

* 20060710 - BSR - v*.0 - So tierd of copy-paste-edit for the parameters that I'm not going to update the comment any more.

Benanov:

I personally love the reserved word escaping:

_as
_do
_is

Thankfully pi isn't one--it's System.Math.PI

And params arrays are probably the best bet for fixing the original problem, but that's just a stopgap.  I can't really think of a better way because I haven't done Excel Interop (and now I just jinxed myself, sigh)

I've wondered: The real WTF is: Why they have _as. ?
Now I'm wondering: Why they don't used variable name @as. ?

Unless I'm very much mistaken, Excel has a SUM(...) function - surely anyone who could write this would know that...

The substitue nulls thing would work, assuming there were no non-null cells they wanted to exclude.

Honestly, this is the first WTF that I believe to be fake.

JBL:

Who typed it all in the first time? The next patient over in the Carpal Tunnel Ward?

Maybe they were clever enough to make a copy of the "int aa" through "int az" block, then instructing their text editor to replace "int a" with "int b"?  All that computing power sitting on your desk must be good for something, after all...

WorksheetFunction.Sum(Range("A1:Z99"))

Alex Papadimoulis:

public long addUpAllExcelColumns(

  int a,  int b,  int c,  int d,  int e,  int f,  int g,  int h, // snip  
  int zy, int zz)

{

    return 

      a+b+c+d+e+f+g+h // snip

      +zy+zz;

}

Okay, I'm not a 100% sure about this (only 99), but isn't there a second WTF here? The method takes around seven hundred 32-bit integers and is supposed to return their sum as 64-bit long, but it actually does 32-bit integer addition all the way, thereby potentially discarding the most significant bits?!?

why not use

excel.worksheetfunction.sum()

Pyromancer:

I'd say from my experience that in C# you can get a DataTable from excel file in umm 3 lines and then add it up in 2 more lines :) Thus cutting over 100 lines of this craptastic solution to mere 5 lines :)

So how many lines of code did you write today?  Minus 95?

So is this "a function to quit for," or "a function to get yourself fired for" on account of extremely unsactisfactory output (in terms of lines of code)?

Amazing people have not discovered the simplicity of arrays as parameters...

public long addUpAllExcelColumns(int[] Columns)
{
   //do whatever
}

-jeff

Writing a small program to generate the functions won't be hard ... and in 10 min you're ready with so much source code... it's a whole other thema that the design seems to be f***ed up from the beginning... why should one have a function to sum up integers (really, why only integers?) when it's easier to type "+" instead of calling a function?

Phil the ruler of heck:

JBL:

Who typed it all in the first time? The next patient over in the Carpal Tunnel Ward?

Maybe they were clever enough to make a copy of the "int aa" through "int az" block, then instructing their text editor to replace "int a" with "int b"?  All that computing power sitting on your desk must be good for something, after all...

Um, yes. That gain in efficiency would be well-suited to the original "programmer."

Phil the ruler of heck:

Pyromancer:

I'd say from my experience that in C# you can get a DataTable from excel file in umm 3 lines and then add it up in 2 more lines :) Thus cutting over 100 lines of this craptastic solution to mere 5 lines :)

So how many lines of code did you write today?  Minus 95?

So is this "a function to quit for," or "a function to get yourself fired for" on account of extremely unsactisfactory output (in terms of lines of code)?

Better to advertise the increase in performance in such a case.

c# actually has something called a "params" array..   using it for this would be an abuse of its design (as if the current design isn't already), but it might make maintenance easier

public long addUpAllExcelColumns(params int[] columnVals)
{
  //todo: validate

  int sum = 0;
  foreach (int i in columnVals) {
    sum += i;
  }
  return sum;
}

then you could call it with however many parameters you want (a-z, aa-zz, aaaaa-zzzzz)