[abernard1]

I kid you not, I know exactly what you're talking about there. I also wrote my own regex parsers with fast-forward and rewind tokenizers, because it was so dreadful. I wouldn't normally do that.

There's also 4 (4!!!) different ways of returning errors in the MWS Feed APIs when used from Java. Given the number of entities, and the fact that they're combinatorial I had to do some of the craziest Scala code I've ever written because duplication was just too bad to handle for how critical that code was. To do it in a bulletproof way, that error handling for MWS feeds inherently has 2^4 control flows * N entities = 16N code paths at like 100-200 lines a piece if you didn't use some higher order abstractions.