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

Uh, I don't get it...

[rob-of-unspace.livejournal.com]

There's obviously something wrong with that, based on the setup, but I don't see it. It has been a while since I've C'd, and most of that was C++. Help for the clueless?

Re: Uh, I don't get it...

[cellio]

What's the equality operator (in C or C++ or Java)?

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

Heh heh, excellent.

[schulman.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's beautiful.

(For tragically depressing values of beautiful.)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I want a type-safe administration.

[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)."
:-)

[siderea]

*snorfl*

Brilliant.

[cellio]

That was about my reaction, too.

[cellio]

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

[mhnicholson.livejournal.com]

I am so meming that.

Re: Uh, I don't get it...

[goljerp]

Actually, while I saw the bug (I'm a Java person, not so much C/C++), in Java I think the compiler would complain about the code as written. Unfortunately, I think the current supreme court is much more likely to let that pass than the Java compier.

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

It is so hard why I laugh at these things when I'm in our computer lab.

[jducoeur]

That is beautifully subtle. I know C well, and it still took a minute for the "pun" to sink in. (It's playing on the nuances and ambiguities of the language, therefore it's a pun. A double-entendre, even...)

[sethg]

And these are the same guys who don't want us to implement a subclass (ahem) of Marriage that takes two Male or two Female objects in its constructor....

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Most excellent.. and I hate to admit how often that one character has caused me grief and woe in JavaScript.