Slashdot Mirror
What is the Best Bug-as-a-Feature?
Bat Country wonders: "The workflow system, at the department I develop for, was hand-coded by my predecessor in a rather short amount of time, resulting in somewhat unreadable code with a number of interesting 'features.' When I took over maintenance of the code base, I started patching bugs and cleaning up the code in preparation for a new set of features. After I was done, I got a pile of complaints about features that had disappeared, which turned out to be caused by the bugs in the code. So, that leads me to ask: what is your favorite bug that you either can't live without or makes your life easier?"
As a programmer, I'm amused by both.
4 and 4.0 are equal by value but not in precision. 4 has one significant digit, while 4.0 has two. This is important because multiplying it by 1200 (which has two significant digits), yields two scientifically different answers. 4*1200 yields 5000 (5 x 10^3) while 4.0*1200 yields 4800 (4.8 x 10^3).
I'm curious as to what broke piece of crap you are using that thinks that 4*1200 is 5000. Dude, that's just wrong and it has nothing to do with precision at all. I guess in your world 2 + 2 does equal 5 for sufficiently large values of 2, as the old joke goes.