In Windows 3.1, there were undocumented functions named USERÂSEEÂUSERÂDO
and GDIÂSEEÂGDIÂDO
. Surely there’s a story behind these funny names.
Of course.
These functions were used for internal testing purposes. They allowed stress tests to do things like allocate extra memory in the desktop heap in order to trigger low-memory conditions in the window manager. They also were used by the 16-bit tool helper library to do things like enumerate all the window classes that have been registered.
The name of the USERÂSEEÂUSERÂDO
function is evidently a play on the idiom monkey see, monkey do. In this case, USER
is the thing being told to do various strange things, and it dutifully does them. But it’s also a joke, because the word user here could be interpreted as referring to the end user.
The GDIÂSEEÂGDIÂDO
function arrived later, and its name was patterned after USERÂSEEÂUSERÂDO
. Nevermind that it’s really not much of a joke.
Bonus chatter: Some of the random things that USERÂSEEÂUSERÂDO
and GDIÂSEEÂGDIÂDO
did have been formalized in the GetÂGuiÂResources
function.
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