In any event, I was impressed enough that I quit looking for the offending test, telling the Big Boss I couldn't find it. He didn't seem surprised.
Reminds me of a time, years ago, where I was trying to modify a program written in 6502 assembler. In addition to pervasive self-modifing code, another extremely popular practice of the era was inlined function-call parameters. Unlike the C approach, which most of you are probably familiar with, where parameters are pushed onto the stack, then a subroutine is called which pops them, instead the subroutine would pop the return address, and use it as a pointer to the function parameters. At the end of the function, the return address pointer would be incremented and jumped to. You're probably thinking, this is nuts. Why would anyone do this? Consider the following line of C code: result = function(x,y,z); One could write this in 6502 assembler as: JSR function DATA x DATA y DATA z STA result where x,y,z,result are pointers to storage locations. This made coding in assembler just as easy as coding in C, and it took less memory because you didn't need all those push/pop instructions. Doing this on a modern processor would probably wreck havok on the decode pipeline. Apple's ProDOS used this type of calling sequence, and most disassemblers dealt with this special case by correctly identifying the parameters as such. But one of the worst I ran into was this: JSR printf ASC "Hello, world!",0 ... You can imagine what the disassembler did with that. Spit out all sorts of garbage as it tried to interpret the ASCII string "Hello, world!" as machine instructions. I encountered this in some BBS software, and had a real difficult time reading it. Finally I got the idea of taking the partially disassembled code, identifying all the branch target addresses, then redisassembling starting at those addresses. It worked. After a few iterations of this I had all the entry points, and everything that didn't disassemble cleanly was outputted as hex data. For fun, run objdump on a cleanly compiled unix binary... It makes it all look so easy... :)