This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: How old code bases can be ugly Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Panopticon has some fascinating "war stories" about the date handling code in parts of the Windows code base. And this part that I quoted is just priceless:

(I also heard tell that at one point back in the mists of Excel 5 days, the VB team experimented with allowing the language syntax to be localizable. So you could say, I don't know, 1CPor x = 1 a 5 : Escribe x :%A0Siguiente x 1D, if you pardon my horrible Spanish. This turned out to be such a horrible idea that they quickly dropped it and never looked back. But supposedly the legacy lives on in OLE Automation and the fact that IDispatch takes a locale ID when converting names to DispIDs (i.e. so that you could have different method names for different languages). I can't vouch for the absolute truthfulness of this story, but it's one of those stories that's 1Ctoo good to check. 1D)

Without care and feeding, old code bases can get really, really crufty...