On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:07:51 -0400 James Carlson wrote: > Glenn Fowler writes: > > On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:30:24 -0400 James Carlson wrote: > > > I think what's missing there is that this is (unfortunately) not just > > > a minority of developers. The bulk of user-space software looks like > > > this these days. People are just plain careless, ... > > > > this is a bit harsh > > people tend to code to what their local system tolerates
> I've thought about it a bit, and I'm going to stand by it. Even if > your system 'tolerates' something as an implementation artifact, that > doesn't make it right. > In order for this to be something other than simple carelessness, I > think the developer would have had to have seen that "(null)" output, > and decided, "eh, that's good enough." If that's what happened, then > what I wrote isn't probably harsh enough. as is this case with many of my bugs, they are data dependent and my regression tests never hit all of the cases cooked up by ingenous users so instead of "eh, that's good enough" its "didn't think of that" and "the next release will have a fix and companion test(s)" -- different from "carelessness" -- Glenn Fowler -- AT&T Research, Florham Park NJ --
