CodeSOD: Wait for the End

Donald was cutting a swathe through a jungle of old Java code, when he found this:

protected void waitForEnd(float time) {// do nothing}

Well, this function sure sounds like it's waiting around to die. This protected method is called from a private method, and you might expect that child classes actually implement real functionality in there, but there were no child classes. This was called in several places, and each time it was passed Float.MAX_VALUE as its input.

Poking at that odd function also lead to this more final method:

public void waitAtEnd() {System.exit(0);}

This function doesn't wait for anything- it just ends the program. Finally and decisively. It is the end.

I know the end of this story: many, many developers have worked on this code base, and many of them hoped to clean up the codebase and make it better. Many of them got lost, never to return. Many ran away screaming.

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