In 2010 I opened a ticket about Scala’s broken name mangling. Of course the problem persists to this day: like so many of Scala’s fundamental issues, it will never be fixed. The original title of the ticket:

Name mangling has outstripped the abilities of lonesome ‘$’

A couple years down the road, the issue database was transitioned from the minimal but functional Trac to the deeply loathsome JIRA. The migration was botched: almost every existing ticket had all of its dollar signs doubled. $ became $$, $$ became $$$$, and so on.

My pleas went unanswered; it was never fixed. Since that time, the title of SI-2806 has been an ode to the oxymoronic:

Name mangling has outstripped the abilities of lonesome ‘$$’

In the years since, whenever I point someone to a ticket about name mangling, they will be confused beyond all reason if I don’t also tell them that all the dollar signs have been doubled up. Think of it: literal code blocks and error messages, but which no longer correspond to reality, yet with no indication given in the ticket. You couldn’t invent a more effective time waster. Is it any wonder that the issue database is so universally ignored, even by those who work on the Scala compiler?

The latest in this comedy of cascading brokenness came when I offered the usual proviso about $-doubling on Gitter. Here is what I wrote:

As usual, where you see $ you should think $$ because the issue database was mangled and left to die. Lonesome ‘$$’ is particularly poignant.

Which was to be rendered on Gitter like so:

And there you have it. KaTeX parse error. I give up.