11–20 of 233 posts
This leverages Perl's BEGIN block which runs before the main part of the code. I suppose the same fun could be had in other languages: if day_of_week is "Friday" eval(piece_of_incorrect_code) else do_sane_operation
But because Perl is parsed as it is executed, incorrect code raises syntax error only when it is reached by execution.
I had an intern once who wrote similar code. They confused 12 hour and 24 hour clocks, so the code would break after lunch. Unfortunately, the intern only worked the mornings, so it took several days of back and forth before the bug could be finally put to rest.
I have written code that only works in winter because of daylight saving times and some unfortunate date conversions, but having a temporary correct syntax is really a new high.
I have written code (at work) that crashes when the moon is in a specific phase. I had a "switch(moon_phase)" and forgot one of the cases... And the Android app was in debug mode, so any uncaught exception brought the whole thing down.
I ended up getting the known correct unixtime from the server to try to guess which timezone offset the user actually meant and correcting the result of System.currentTimeMillis() and my formatting for that.
I have written code that only works in winter because of daylight saving times and some unfortunate date conversions, but having a temporary correct syntax is really a new high.
Not sure where you are located, but this can be particularly bad in the UK where winter time happens to coincide with UTC.
I have written code that only works in winter because of daylight saving times and some unfortunate date conversions, but having a temporary correct syntax is really a new high.
It turns out we never did a release before 10:00, because it ran fine for a few years, but the regex constructing the filename could not deal with hours consisting of 1 number.
Oh well, never write production shell scripts while your platform is burning.
The fix is literally 1 character, but I only get access when production burns. So I was not allowed to change it and the owner does not want to implement it and file all release paperwork it entails. Instead, mgmt forbid this type of release before 10:00.
I have written code that only works in winter because of daylight saving times and some unfortunate date conversions, but having a temporary correct syntax is really a new high.
> I have written code that only works in winter because of daylight saving times and some unfortunate date conversions Not sure where you are located, but this can be particularly bad in the UK where winter time happens to coincide with UTC.
Somewhat related: Perl Cannot Be Parsed: A Formal Proof (2008) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5770531
If it could not be parsed it could never work!
And this is totally OK in my book, I use Perl for prototyping ideas and an expressive language that allows creativity from me the programmer is a feature as it promotes looking at a problem from multiple aspects.
A handful of curated weird stories like this: https://500mile.email/
This leverages Perl's BEGIN block which runs before the main part of the code. I suppose the same fun could be had in other languages: if day_of_week is "Friday" eval(piece_of_incorrect_code) else do_sane_operation
Most other languages would require `eval` and having incorrect code as syntactically correct string literal. But because Perl is parsed as it is executed, incorrect code raises syntax error only when it is reached by execution.
I have written code that only works in winter because of daylight saving times and some unfortunate date conversions, but having a temporary correct syntax is really a new high.
> I have written code that only works in winter because of daylight saving times and some unfortunate date conversions Not sure where you are located, but this can be particularly bad in the UK where winter time happens to coincide with UTC.
To fix this they ran a SQL script that changed the end date on the DST switch over but that had some poor assumptions in it and made it worse.
It also had to be correct in the past and the future.
I just rewrote the whole fucking thing from scratch.