Java Interview Puzzler
June 18th, 2009 by 
hashbrown
This is a puzzler we created at my work to use as an interview problem. I had a fun time taking it myself, and got it wrong the first time! It was designed to mimic some bad legacy code you might encounter when working on a large aging system, that has passed through many hands. Terrible coding practices, no javadocs or comments, etc. You are tasked to figure out what the heck it does.
First – does it compile? If not, how do you fix it?
Second – If it compiles, what is the output?
I’ll answer questions and post the solution in the comments.
package crazy;
public class Timing extends R {
public static final Integer t = new Integer("4");
public static void main(String[] args) {
Timing t = new Timing(11);
System.out.print(t.foo);
bat(t);
}
void fob() { fod(); }
public Timing(int value) {
super();
foo = foo % value;
bar();
}
static {
System.out.print("6");
}
private void bar() {
new Baz().bar(5);
tr = "2";
}
private int foo = 25;
static void r() { System.out.println("1"); }
}
abstract class R {
String tr = "9";
static void bat(R r) {
r.fob();
System.out.print(r.tr);
}
private int negate(int bam) {
return bam * -1;
}
public R() {
System.out.print("7");
}
void fod() { System.out.print((int)Math.floor(.99)); }
protected final int t() {
return 5;
}
class Baz {
void bar(int fob) {
if (fob == 9)
System.out.print(String.valueOf(fob++));
System.out.print(String.valueOf(negate(fob++)));
if (fob == 5)
System.out.print(String.valueOf(fob+=2));
}
}
static {
System.out.print("8");
}
abstract void fob();
}
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