Feb 12 2008

Spot the deliberate mistake

Published by Dougal at 11:17 pm under Bugs, Humour, Programming

You know the optical illusion type thing which has a word repeated at the end of one line and the beginning of another?

   This is exactly the
the kind of thing I mean.

They’re always horribly difficult to spot. I’m pretty sure I noticed one in the blurb on the back of one of my books at some point, but I don’t know which one. I just had a quick look at some of the potential culprits — I had a feeling it was William Gibson — but couldn’t find it. But then, maybe my eye just skipped over it?

Either way, I just reported this bug in GeSHi, in the Haskell highlighter. This is taken from the middle of a long list of standard functions…

      'zip3', 'zipWith', 'zipWith3', 'unzip', 'unzip3',
      'unzip', 'unzip3', 'lines', 'words', 'unlines',

…and notice how unzip and unzip3 are in there twice? Well, it causes the linking tool (which creates web links to the Haskell API for these functions) to break on these two functions. It never ceases to amaze how silly some bugs can be. ;-)

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply