Today's anonymous submitter works for a company that handles customer rewards perks. It's handling thousands of dollars of transactions a day, which isn't a huge amount, but it's certainly non-trivial.

Now, there's a conversion formula from points to dollars: points/100*1.7. Now how would someone implement this complex formula in PHP? Well, our submitter's predecessor did it this way:

$divfactor = 100;
$multfactor = 1.7;
$vcvalue = $points;
$divoperation = "/";
$multoperation = "*";
$valcalc = eval('return '.$vcvalue.$divoperation.$divfactor.$multoperation.$multfactor.';');

Was this an attempt at obfuscation? Because it didn't work. I understand exactly what the code is doing. But I'm also left wondering… why. What did they hope to gain?

It's forever a mystery.