torture bill summed up in C

[cellio]

From patrissimo, who got it from others:

It occurs to me now that the whole 94-page bill really amounts to a common, one-character programming error.

if (person = terrorist) {
   punish_severely();
   } else {
     exit(-1);
   }

Comments

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

They'd have caught the bug (assignment operator instead of equality test) had "terrorist" been defined as a constant, and the condition been written "if (terrorist = person)."
:-)

[cellio]

Yup. Putting the constant on the left-hand side is a sure way to catch assignment/equality bugs.