Chapter 2. It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Language Feature

Bugs are by far the largest and most successful class of entity, with nearly a million known species. In this respect they outnumber all the other known creatures about four to one.

—Professor Snopes’ Encyclopedia of Animal Life

why language features matter…sins of commission: switches let you down with fall through…available hardware is a crayon?…too much default visibility…sins of mission: overloading the camel’s back…“some of the operators have the wrong precedence”…the early bug gets() the Internet worm…sins of omission: mail won’t go to users with an “f” in their user name…space–the final frontier…the compiler date is corrupted…lint should never have been separated out…some light relief—some features really are bugs