Horror Code: The Matryoshka Functions

Some years ago, when I was a Windows developer, the maintenance of a big project has been assigned to me. My job was to fix a couple of minor bugs and add some new functions. The problem was that the creator (and previous maintainer) have resigned years before, leaving absolutely no documentation.

The only thing I could do was to look the code and read the few comments. At some point, I found a call to the function GetName(). Changing the string returned by that function was one of the things in my to-do list, so I looked for the implementation. And this is what I found:

CString GetName()
  {
    return GetValue("Name");
  }

Pretty useless, don't you think? OK, let's see the implementation of GetValue():

#define MAIN_APP   "Main"

CString GetValue(CString szField)
  {
    return GetField(MAIN_APP, szField);
  }

Is this a joke? Well, let's see where the story ended:

#define MAIN_INI   "main.ini"

CString GetField(CString szSection, CString szField)
  {
    char szResult[100];

    GetPrivateProfileString(
        (LPCTSTR) szSection,
        (LPCTSTR) szField,
        "App",
        szResult,
        100,
        MAIN_INI
    );

    return szResult;
  }

Surprised? Now I'm sure you are wondering why someone had done this. I'm still wondering too.

Cover image from Wikimedia Commons by Fanghong  licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Post last updated on 2022/06/05.