Way back in 1964, people were starting to recgonize that computers were going to have a large impact on the world. There was not, at the time, very much prepackaged software, which meant if you were going to use a computer to do work, you were likely going to have to write your own programs. The tools to do that weren't friendly to non-mathematicians.

Thus, in 1964, was BASIC created, a language derived from experiments with languages like DOPE (The Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). The goal was to be something easy, something that anyone could use.

For C programmers of a certain age (antique), booleans represent a frustrating challenge. But with the addition of stdbool.h, we exited the world of needing to work hard to interact with boolean values. While some gotchas are still in there, your boolean code has the opportunity to be simple.

Mark's predecessor saw how simple it made things, and decided that wouldn't do. So that person went and wrote their own special way of comparing boolean values. It starts with an enum:

Konrad was trying to understand how an input form worked, and found this validation function.

function IsReallyEmpty($subject)
{
        $trimmed = trim(preg_replace("/&.*;/", "", $subject));
        return strlen($trimmed) != 0;
}

Anthony found this solution to handling 404 errors which um… probably shouldn't have been found.

function show_404($page = '') {
        $uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
        error_log("Caught 404: $uri");
        $redirect_url = "";
       
        switch($uri){
                case "/SOMEURL":
                        $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/SOMEURL";
                        break;
                case "/SOMEOTHERURL":
                        $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/SOMEOTHERURL";
                        break;
                case "/YETANOTHERURL":
                        $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/YETANOTHERURL";
                        break;
                // ... THERE ARE 300 of these ...
                case "/MOREURLS":
                        $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/MOREURLS";
                        break;
                case "/EVENMOREURLS":
                        $redirect_url="http://www.SOMEWEBSITE.com/EVENMOREURLS";
                        break;
        }

        if ($redirect_url){
                Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
                Header( "Location: $redirect_url" );
        } else {
                parent::show_404($page);
        }
}

Joseph was doing a refactoring effort, merging some duplicated functions into one, cleaning up unused Java code that really should have been deleted ages ago, and so on. But buried in that pile of code that needed cleaning up, Joseph found this little bit of code, to validate that an input was a percentage.

@Override
public Integer validatePercent(final String perc, final int currentPerc){
    char[] percProc= perc.toCharArray();
    char[] newPerc = new char[perc.length()];
    int percent=0;
    int y=0;
    if(percProc.length>4){
        return -1;
    }
    for(int x=0;x<percProc.length;x++){
        if(Character.isDigit(percProc[x])){
            newPerc[y]=percProc[x];
            y++;
        }
    }
    if(y==0){
        return -1;
    }
    
    String strPerc=(new String(newPerc));
    strPerc=strPerc.trim();
    if(strPerc.length()!=0){
        percent=Integer.parseInt(strPerc);
        if(percent<0){
            return -1;
        }else if(percent>100){
            return -1;
        }else if(Integer.parseInt(strPerc)==currentPerc){
            return -1;
        }else{
            return Integer.parseInt(strPerc);
        }
    }else{
        return-1;
    }
}