CodeSOD

"About two years ago," Simon writes, "I worked for a small telecommunications company. Turnover was fairly high, leaving not much consistency in the way applications were developed."

Sometimes you see some code and can feel the frustration of the original developer. Sometimes it's because of profanity-laden comments in the code, other times it's because you can tell that they were right on the brink of a major breakthrough, but gave up.

Thomas Nordlander writes: "The Swedish Church of Scientology's scary personality test contains some pretty awesome JavaScript validation. Consider the ingenious way that they make sure they are dealing with numbers."

"It should be pretty simp--" David M cut himself off. He learned his lesson. Nothing at his new job was Pretty Simple.

Submitted anonymously: "I found this in a data access layer for an application testing framework. The object has fields that are obviously meant to contain integers, doubles, and DateTime objects, but they are all strings and this is the only constructor:

James H. writes "If you had to programatically output a list of HTML <a> tags linking to anchors for the Alphabet like this:

The value of Pi is not as 3.14159265…ish as many of us would like to believe. Legislators in Indiana once declared Pi as 3.2, 4, and 3.23. Staunch biblical mathematicians insist that it's 3. The whole thing is a mess: everyone just has to have their very own Pi.

"It's not every day that you come across a hand-coded, table based parser," writes Joel Davis. "That's pretty hardcore. I figured it must have been needed for checking if millions of strings were uints in some super-important inner-loop. Obviously, there had to be a reason to avoid 'strtol', 'atoi' or even 'isdigit'..."

Pop quiz, hot shot. There are seven different true/false flags. You have only a single integer to represent them. What do you do? What do you do?

"It should be pretty simple," David M naïvely stated, "just look in the Agent_ProductLines table, right?"