Pokemon R/B/Y - Unused double / halve stats functions
25In Pokemon Red, Blue, and Yellow there is a function that causes one or more stats of a Pokemon to be doubled and a similar function to halve them instead. These functions are called only in battle whenever the player's or enemy's active Pokemon is cured of a status affliction with a status healing item such as Antidote or Full Heal. For player's side, the stats doubled will be those indicated at address D060 while the stats to halve are requested at address D061. For enemy's side, D065 and D066 are used, respectively. In both cases, each of the four stats is represented as a bit (bits 0-3 for Atk, Def, Spd, and Spc respectively) of said address. However, these addresses are always 0 as they are never written into, not even prior to calling the two aforementioned functions. This renders these two stat-affecting routines useless. Not only this, but because the turn variable (FFF3) isn't updated until an attack is selected, it may contain the wrong value depending on who moved first in the previous turn, which would have caused these functions to target the stats of the wrong Pokemon in some cases.
Considering that the stats are reseted to their original values upon using a healing item on a Pokemon, these two functions might have been early (and inaccurate) attempts at replicating stat boosts or drops from moves like Growl or Swords Dance, or their goal might have been related to nullifying the paralysis/burn stat penalties. Or who knows.