16 lines
874 B
Plaintext
16 lines
874 B
Plaintext
C Programmer's Disease
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n. The tendency of the undisciplined C programmer to set arbitrary but
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supposedly generous static limits on table sizes (defined, if you're lucky,
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by constants in header files) rather than taking the trouble to do proper
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dynamic storage allocation. If an application user later needs to put 68
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elements into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer reasons that he
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or she can easily reset the table size to 68 (or even as much as 70, to
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allow for future expansion) and recompile. This gives the programmer the
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comfortable feeling of having made the effort to satisfy the user's
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(unreasonable) demands, and often affords the user multiple opportunities to
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explore the marvelous consequences of fandango on core. In severe cases of
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the disease, the programmer cannot comprehend why each fix of this kind
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seems only to further disgruntle the user.
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