Random snippets from work

Things which will probably make sense only to other computer people.

One of the things I do at work is code readability reviews, which are the intense initial reviews that everyone has to get before they’re allowed to check anything in. (Style correctness, etc) I just noticed that one of the people doing Python readability reviews is Guido van Rossum.

From a thread at work:

> So this is undefined behavior, and the compiler is free to do
> _anything_, including always returning 0x1234

Language lawyers and compiler people are always threatening to do
things like this when standards call for undefined behavior, but they
never actually do it. The world would be a much more fun place (and
we’d probably find more latent bugs) if gcc had a –psychotic mode.

Truer words were never spoken.

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Published in: on September 28, 2006 at 12:31  Comments (13)  
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13 Comments

  1. On September 28, 2006 at 19:39 pope_guilty said:

    You work with the guy who does Python?
    That’s pretty awesome.

  2. On September 28, 2006 at 19:39 pope_guilty said:

    You work with the guy who does Python?
    That’s pretty awesome.

  3. On September 28, 2006 at 20:00 xthread said:

    Oh, that’s beautiful.
    And just think of the uses – finally, a way to demonstrate, without question or reservation, that it doesn’t matter what that module returns, no matter what it will always make the programs behavior worse, just by turning on –psychotic and seeing that the resulting code runs better than the original..

  4. On September 28, 2006 at 20:00 xthread said:

    Oh, that’s beautiful.
    And just think of the uses – finally, a way to demonstrate, without question or reservation, that it doesn’t matter what that module returns, no matter what it will always make the programs behavior worse, just by turning on –psychotic and seeing that the resulting code runs better than the original..

  5. On September 28, 2006 at 20:31 kamileon said:

    If Guido the one suggesting –psychotic mode, or the one suggesting that the compiler could return 0x1234? I’ve always suspected him to be the former sort of guy, it would warm my heart to hear that he was the latter.

  6. On September 28, 2006 at 20:31 kamileon said:

    If Guido the one suggesting –psychotic mode, or the one suggesting that the compiler could return 0x1234? I’ve always suspected him to be the former sort of guy, it would warm my heart to hear that he was the latter.

  7. On September 28, 2006 at 20:34 zunger said:

    He was neither. This was a totally separate thread. 🙂

  8. On September 28, 2006 at 20:34 zunger said:

    He was neither. This was a totally separate thread. 🙂

  9. On September 28, 2006 at 20:37 kamileon said:

    Ok, so the Guido thing was just as a point of reference? 🙂
    A –psychotic mode really would be handy, especially for writing portable code…

  10. On September 28, 2006 at 20:38 zunger said:

    Nah, just a separate story.
    As far as the psychotic mode: Someone else on the thread claims that an older version of gcc would start to play nethack when it encountered behavior that was exceptionally out-of-spec. I have no idea if that’s true, but I deeply hope that it is.

  11. On September 28, 2006 at 20:44 zunger said:

    …And apparently the nethack story is true, in gcc1.34.

  12. On September 28, 2006 at 21:01 kamileon said:

    that just rules. 🙂

  13. On September 29, 2006 at 05:39 hastings1066 said:

    I was wondering why I was having portability issues with that version of the toolchain…Also, I would love –psychotic mode. Kids these days just don’t get it when you tell them it is nondeterministic: [real exchange at work]
    “…but the version of the compiler we use doesn’t do any of that, it does what we expect.”
    “What do we ship, binary or source?”
    “Source”
    *pointed stare*
    “oh…” *wanders off*
    *sigh*


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