[TUHS] Re: A fuzzy awk.

[Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu>]

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On 5/20/24 9:30 AM, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi Chet,
> 
>> Is it better to spend time on bugs that will affect a larger
>> percentage of the user population, instead of those that require
>> artificial circumstances that won't be encountered by normal usage?
>> Those get pushed down on the priority list.
> 
> You're talking about pushing unlikely, fuzzed bugs down the prioritised
> list, but we're discussing those bugs not getting onto the list for
> consideration.

I think the question is whether they were bugs in gawk at all, or the
result of gawk trying to be helpful by guessing at the script's intent
and trying to go on. Arnold's reaction to that, which had these negative
effects most often as the result of fuzzing attempts, was to exit on the
first syntax error.

Would those `bugs' have manifested themselves if gawk hadn't tried to do
this? Are they bugs at all? Guessing at intent is bound to be wrong some
of the time, and cause errors of its own.

I'm saying that fuzzing does occasionally find obscure bugs -- bugs that
would never be encountered in normal usage -- and those should be fixed.
Eventually.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/


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