[SATLUG] San Antonio's Daily WTF

[Bob Tracy]

Travis H. wrote:
> Bruce Schneier says that "turning of assertions in production code
> is equivalent to unbuckling your seat belts when you finish Driver's
> Ed" (paraphrased).  I think that's going a bit far.

Cute...

> But what an assertion _should_ be used for is detecting an internal
> inconsistency that the developer thought shouldn't happen.  In cases
> like that, the program has strayed into a really weird area, and it
> would be pointless to hope for it to correct the error, since the
> developer thought this state should never be reached.

One of the best of such things I personally witnessed was the one-liner
on the console of a PDP-11/70:

"Shut 'er down, Slim!  She's pumpin' mud..."

Memory gets fuzzy at this point, but I think the message was buried
deep in file system driver code.

-- 
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Bob Tracy                   WTO + WIPO = DMCA? http://www.anti-dmca.org
rct at frus.com
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