A little more than a year ago, Nathan T's company decided to outsource a large portion of certain project to a certain country many thousands of miles away. "Even if the code quality isn't as good," one manager would often say, "we'll just pay them to rewrite it and rewrite it again. It'll still be less expensive."

Extended that logic even further, management decided to not only outsource overseas, but outsource to the cheapest overseas firm they could find. Eventually, they'd end up with solid code, right?

As it turned out, each iteration of their code got more and more... interesting. The developers across the pond didn't quite grasp the basics of object-oriented programming (especially the whole "reference type" versus "value type" thing), and ended up writing a lot of "superstitious" code to make sure the compiler would do exactly what they wanted. Of course, being that the outsourcing firm delivered well over hundreds of thousands of lines of superstitious code, there's really only one way to represent it all: 

      int j = int.Parse(i.ToString()); // provides deep copy of j

At least that line worked... if only the other 99,999 lines would.

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