There is sometimes a period in which you are studying something and you truly can't tell whether you are just missing the big picture or if what you are working for is in fact a poorly designed, incomprehensible and incoherent mess.

Usually there is an ah-ha moment where you realize what the original designer was thinking, so you keep trying to wrap your brain around it, approaching it from different angles, all with the assumption that the designers choices were part of a rational, well though plan.

What would even be more helpful is if the creator(s) of the format would have dotted their code with comments such as

//This is an ugly hack, but I've been working 24 hours straight surviving on energy drinks

There's enough bloat in Adobe's wares without packing the code out with comments, surely?

I really hope you're joking.

I'd love to have his babies, from the hero aspect, but you just don't cut your salary, present and future, by doing that sort of stuff. Next thing I know he will be unemployed which rather messes with the future of my children.

Fortunately I am less impressed with God. The back I can cope with but not being able to fart, and the rest of the backup, is something else.

While I can understand his frustration entirely, and his desire to rant about incomprehensible formats, I can't help but wonder whether if he had gone through the bureaucratic nightmare necessary to obtain the format specification and documents rather than presumably attempt to reverse engineer the mess, they might have actually helped understand it and made life easier? Probably not, but I can wonder...

Steve.

While I was writing encoding/decoding software to this spec, I was reminded of The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, what with all of the "shall be" and "shall not" when encoding integer types.

The Microsoft implementation simply blew past all of that strict complexity and did it wrong.

Maybe if he had the proper spec from Adobe, he'd have more idea of why things were done the way they were (not saying the format isn't shit, maybe it is...)

> I would fire those lousy coders at adobe and force them to wite in batch file programming for the > next 20 years as punishment.

Using edlin.. no sense in making it too easy

I have been the recipient of such comments of the "Dear Dave, I owe you a proper fix for this hack but it will last through Rel 4.1 unit test. Must fix for 4.2. Cheers, Dave"

There are times when the man to blame and swear at is yourself...

//This is an ugly hack, but I've been working 24 min straight surviving on energy drinks

goes at the top of everything i make !

"when he uses a goto statement on line 432"

So friggin what? If you subscribe to the out of date "never ever use a goto anywhere" paradigm more fool you. If you look carefully you'll notice he was using it to jump out of some nested loops

before the inner loop was commented out. A lot more sensible than the idiotic "if (flag) break" nonsense to do the same I see from the brainwashed Knuth acolytes.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-comment-in-source-code-you-have-ever-encountered

I used to work with someone who had claimed to have acheived that self same task. You are he, AICMFP!

Properly used, goto is perfectly acceptable.