Blessed Mother of Commented-out Code

It's the little things in life that give pleasure, isn't it? Like the lovely comment below, which has adorned a source file at my company for nearly sixteen (16) years now (meaning the file is at least 5 years older than the company).

/*****************************#if (0) //[
// Marked code has been deleted   -- XXXX (18 August, 1994)
// No need to check whether the value is X/X/X
// Only the size is to be checked which has been done
[[[ DELETED

      char  val;

      val=tolower(*((char*) var)->getValue());
      if ((val != 'X') && (val != 'X') && (val != 'X'))
          return 0;
]]]
   #endif //]
*************************************/

There are many facets to this beautiful gem. First you'll notice that there is a nice C++-style // comment -- complete with the date and the signature of Mr. XXXX -- itself commented out by a C-style /* comment. Too bad the dead code isn't commented with //, so that my grep for tolower would have stood out as unnecessary.

But look, really the /* is there to comment out an #if 0. The guy must have wanted emacs to colorize the dead code as a comment -- I don't think emacs had font-lock back then, but there was the hilit19 package.

Still, you can't be too careful, so let's also wrap that code up in a [[[DELETED ... ]]], in case there is some human that can't read the C comments and the if-0, but who will understand what "triple-bracket DELETED" means.

Finally, it appears the conditional was originally written as #if (0) [ ... ] -- was that ever legal C? -- but when that wouldn't compile, the brackets had to be commented out, because every character in this file is too precious to ever delete. This must be the bad code afterlife. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

How did all this happen? Is it an accumulation of different commenting-out strategies that occurred over time? Or is it just an unfortunate snapshot of one man's frenzied efforts to remove 3 lines of code without actually deleting anything? Sadly, we can only speculate on what happened, because these lines entered our repository in exactly this condition over 10 years ago.

I love deleting dead code, but I can't touch this one. It's an antique. And so ugly that it's beautiful.