OK, I have to play.
Over a decade ago I was working on a project with another developer whose job it was to implement the model for a 2D scatter plot. The scatter plot had the ability to color-by and size-by - pick a data column and you would get a color or size gradient based on the data values. We had settled on 20 color steps and 20 size steps for the plot, and he was perplexed by how to accomplish this. I suggested a 20x20 2D array, each element of which would hold the indices of the points corresponding to that a particular size and color, with the data range divided by 20 to get the bins for each one. Not the most elegant solution, but seemed workable.
We were developing in VB 6 and he was enamored with dictionaries - everything was a dictionary. So, he developed a dictionary that would be accessed by a two element string consisting of the bin locations. In other words instead of the array bins(x,y), he had the dictionary bins["x,y"]. In his code, he would compute the color/size bin numerically, combine these into a string, use this to access the dictionary. OK, whatever.
Put on top of this that his code computed the color and size bin locations in different locations and they might not always occur in the same order - sometimes you got "color,size" and sometimes you got "size,color." It all depended on if the user clicked "color by" or "size by" first. Oh, and he would use "first element 0" based calculations in one area and "first element 1" based calculations in another area.
Now the kicker - the item stored in the dictionary was - wait for it - another dictionary. This one was accessed by breaking up the original string key, doing some non-sensical conversions (not the obivous 20*y+x to get a linearlized array from the 2D array), and then access this dictionary with that new, converted key. Which was converted to a string.
I inherited this code when he left.
