The Daily WTF

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.

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