Speaking of horror stories of commercial code, i saw this today in
the news from the microsoft trial and laughed my ass off...

"Felten, who examined the secret "source code" for Windows 98 under a
court order, said he had found 3,000 bugs marked by Microsoft
programmers in the portion of Windows 98 he had examined -- and he
had looked at only one-seventh of it."

3000 bugs in 1/7th of the code!  But companies and people keep buying
it so why bother to fix them ;-)  I wish my customers were so
forgiving!

jim
At a recent computer software engineering course in the US, the participants
were given an awkward question to answer.  "If you had just boarded an
airliner and discovered that your team of programmers had been responsible
for the flight control software, how many of you would disembark
immediately?"
                     unknown author