Re: Discuss changing the behaviour of append()
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jun 11, 2014
- 4766 views
All of my original post was a hypothetical scenario with hyperbola added to indicate the satifactory performace of the product in meeting the users needs.
It may be clever of you to label their program as "not working" just because it doesn't meet your better programming standards.
But it's not a good idea to just label it that way. Agreed. This reminds me of Linus Torvald's rule: http://felipec.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/the-linux-way/
Three failures in 5 years indicating the source file generation works correctly except during sudden power outages or network failures or such.
I.e. rare, unexpected cases. Gotcha. (Of course, you can simulate a power outage (pull the power cord out) or a network failure (unplug your hub/switch), but there's probably always something else that'll trip things up .. eventually. You can't think of everything.)
That said in the real world people do make these choices; hobby programmers, small businesses where the owner is the programmer, etc.
Yes, in the real world ppl sometimes take shortcuts. Agreed.
But for them it meets the need and didn't require a ton of programming. In fact that is one of the strengths of Euphoria. Someone doesn't need to be a professional programmer with knowledge of all the best programming standards to fashion a program that as far as they are concerned works.
Agreed. Still, relying on a program to complete crash in an ungraceful way is kind of unusual and must be rare. I agree with you - it should be ok to make the change to append() (as you agreed), but we should document it well (like we did with the change to length()).
