The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2013-11-07 Reply Admin

da Doctah:
We're all familiar with the story from Knuth that one of his students turned in an ALGOL exercise with the fragment esac; comment bletch tnemmoc;?

No, please elaborate. In detail.

2013-11-07 Reply Admin

user:
Its empty because it shouldn't ever be needed.

Sure. And we all know the famous quote by Douglas Adams (in the fourth(?) hitchhiker book): The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

Just one more example of it :-)

Roby McAndrew · 2013-11-07 Reply Admin

derari:
Noughmad:
I take it you've never seen a case statement in bash. There are few combinations of letter that sound more stupid than 'esac'.
In many languages, the closing token is the opening token mirrored, e.g. '(' and ')', '{' and '}', or '[' and ']'. This is just consistency.

I would accept explanation this if bash also used do...od loops

Addendum (2013-11-07 07:35): "I would accept this explanation if" (doh)

2013-11-07 Reply Admin

Que:
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it. - W. C. FIELDS

If at first you succeed or don't succeed, try again regardless

2013-11-08 Reply Admin

faoileag:
Smug Unix User:
If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.
I counter that with Fahnestock's Rule for Failure: "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried."

oh snap!

# It's a hideous hack for the xfs metadata corruption bug that we've been seeing.

2013-11-09 Reply Admin

Roby McAndrew:
I would accept explanation this if bash also used do...od loops

fi

Now, who told you bash was consistent? It's a shell scripting language, if you want consistency go use python... or perl.

Yeah, actually go use perl [image]

chubertdev · 2013-11-11 Reply Admin

nobulate:
faoileag:
Smug Unix User:
If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.
I counter that with Fahnestock's Rule for Failure: "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried."

oh snap!
# It's a hideous hack for the xfs metadata corruption bug that we've been seeing. You are not expected to understand this.

FTFY.

2013-11-12 Reply Admin

Artur Krajewski:
Met too often ;-)
try { [...] } catch (Exception ex) { #F### it. We always succeed. exit 0 return 0; }

I always wrote it like this:

try { [...] } finally { return; }

chubertdev · 2013-11-12 Reply Admin

Neil:
I always wrote it like this:
try { [...] } finally { return; }

That's going to work well.

2013-11-12 Reply Admin

So, wait... this script sucks. And it's still marginally better than the ones which come with Linux distros, which are totally and completely useless.

Par for the course; typical Open Source design. It would be more surprising if it worked properly.

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