S. Rao (sonny@burdell.org) on 10/20/06 wrote:
---------------------------
>JasonB (no@spam.com) on 10/20/06 wrote:
>
>>I was told once that the safest airport in the world to land at was the old Hong
>>Kong airport, where the planes had to fly at the target on the hillside and then
>>do a 90 degree turn at the last minute to land, flying between buildings as they
>>did so. The reason it was so safe was that it was so bloody tricky that no pilots
>>ever devoted less than 100% of their attention to the maneuver.
>>
>>Programming in C++ is like that. :-)
>
>Ha! If only people's programming errors regularly killed
>them and others, we probably wouldn't see much crap code out
>there

Just as I left my last employer I had to make a few changes to a C program I'd help write. While doing this I found a really horrendous bug. The bug meant that if a configuration file command had the wrong number of arguments then the program could crash!

The habits of the users had kept this bug from being revealed. Had their habits changed just a little they would have been in a real mess.