The Daily WTF

Many years ago, Matt left a position where he developed in FORTRAN, and went off to do other things. The company hired a replacement, and since no one else really understood FORTRAN, they assumed things were fine. Over the course of a decade, their development costs got more expensive, their software got buggier, and deadlines started flying by without a single new feature being released. It took a long time, but they eventually fired Matt’s replacement. Since Matt was looking for a new position around that time, he ended up back in the FORTRAN shop: just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in.

Matt started going through the code that’d been implemented, and… well, here’s an example function signature:

SUBROUTINE TREND_ORA_GET (AASTAT, DATATYPE, ORA_CODE > , MON, YEAR, IN_OPTION, OUT_ARRAY)

Now, if you’re reading this, you might think OUT_ARRAY is an output parameter. You’d

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