2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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gotcha
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. A misfeature of a system, especially a programming language or
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environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it is both
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enticingly easy to invoke and completely unexpected and/or unreasonable in
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its outcome. For example, a classic gotcha in C is the fact that if (a=b)
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{code; } is syntactically valid and sometimes even correct. It puts the
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value of b into a and then executes code if a is non-zero. What the
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programmer probably meant was if (a==b) {code; }, which executes code if a
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and b are equal.
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