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Subject: Re: Most obscure bug *ever*

Author: Daniel Clausen

Date: 07:08:51 10/25/02

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On October 25, 2002 at 05:05:59, Dann Corbit wrote:

[snip]

>The problem is that a huge percentage if input is questionable.  I prefer
>something that fixes and goes on (or reports the problem and goes on, or at
>worst ignores and goes on) to something that just stops running.

I don’t, for the following reasons:

(1) In case of the FEN-string: most of the FEN-strings come from another
program/tool anyway. I rarely create them manually. I do sometimes, but..
.rarely.

(2) Trying to guess what questionable input could mean is
  (a) _very hard_
  (b) error-prone in itself
  (c) kinda useless work, in the sense that it would be much more trivial to
simply fix the _source_ of the problem

Just look at HTML. In a way, writing a browser which does something half-decent
with most web-pages found on the net is _very hard_. Lots of documents are not
even well-formed! Would the browsers just have rejected these documents from the
beginning (most of which were created by tools anyway!), the net-world would be
a bit nicer today.

Sargon



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