I figured out that, in the early versions of Realmz for the Mac, there was an enchanted item (a helm?) that added a few points to the wearer’s stats when equipped, but when removed it took away more than it added (i.e. left you worse off). It only took a few seconds for my programmer brain to start me furiously equipping and then un-equipping it, and sure enough, when that stat went to -127, one more equip-and-unequip was sufficient to give me a +128 bonus for that stat.

I never understood how that particular bit of logic could have been coded that way - it seemed so unnatural.

I would figure the reason was because calculating it based on your inventory every time it's needed would've been expensive, so the developers decided to cache it, but instead of recalculating it from scratch when there's a stat change, they decided to try updating it incrementally, but I guess also imperatively. A string of mistakes has to happen to lead to such a situation but it doesn't seem super unnatural to me.