[FRIAM] div. zero bugs?

[Phil Henshaw]

Giles,

Can you explain what that causes?  You say "is prone to accidental
assignment".  Sounds like variables erroneously change value when
queried.  That's not good.   My limited experience is different, that
code has all kinds of unexpected and hidden structure because it was
written by people like me who can't keep a few dozen simple logical
steps straight when interacting with few dozen others written by someone
else  (i.e. there's confusion lying all around).  Is that also why
variables are accidentally reassigned?   Or something different?

Ok, so then what happens after that?   You don't just come to the wrong
answers it seems, but frequently trigger a cascade of mismatching stuff
that sometimes gets 'trapped' and sometimes not?   Would you describe it
differently?   

> 
> About the only useful discovery I've made along these lines:
> 
> Never do this:
> 
> if @var == "Value"
> 
> Always do this:
> 
> if "Value" == @var
> 
> the reason is because, if you screw up and only put in one 
> equals sign, pretty much every language out there is prone to 
> accidental assignment-during-test bugs, but no languages that 
> I'm aware of are prone to accidental 
> assigning-new-values-to-literals bugs.
> 
> For what it's worth...
> 
> -- 
> Giles Bowkett
> http://www.gilesgoatboy.org
> 
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