Re: PATCH: hist: remove wrong NULL terminator

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>]

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 13:39:06 -0800
Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:
> On 01/09/2015 11:38 AM, Mikael Magnusson wrote:
> 
> > Yes, but it's actually pretty harmless, most other variables on the 
> > stack in that function are never used if we enter this codepath. 
> 
> I guess so, since otherwise there'd be crashes all over the place. Still, it
> has a lethal look about it.  Trying to understand the culture of the project
> I find myself wondering how things like that pass unnoticed, given the
> unquestioned skill level of the people involved.

Bart already answered this once.  There is no "magic away problems with
the force of my intellect" in programming any more than anywhere else.
There are things that happen to show up in real life; there's painstaking
use of tools as Mikael is doing; and there are things you happen to notice
because you were in the area.  The same is true of pretty much all
software apart from the very small subset that can be proved
mathematically correct (and even that's only necessarily true of the
representation of the software in the form you're looking at).  The next
best step is to use a better language than C.  I wasn't entirely joking
when I talked about D, but it's not an option for us.

pws