Our friend Otto@ fixes an old bug..

[BSDfan666]

Otto Moerbeek (otto@) recently found and fixed an ancient bug (some 33 years old) in yacc(1).

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20080708155228

It's things like this that make me proud to be a OpenBSD user, when bug appears.. they go to the extremes to fix it. :)

[revzalot]

Practical paranoia at its finest. ;)

[tuck]

Oh this bug is much older than the one (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20080508193255) that Marc Balmer found a few weeks ago :D
Don't blame the yacc(1) creator "The bug was only triggered on sparc64, since it uses 8k pages." he couldn't know back in '75 that we use 64bit today :D

[TerryP]

Hmm, I guess somethings just slip peoples mind until they bite you in the ass years later :\

@tuck

8=)

Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile heresy which claimeth that ``All the world's a VAX'', and have no commerce with the benighted heathens who cling to this barbarous belief, that the days of thy program may be long even though the days of thy current machine be short.

[18Googol2]

Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile heresy which claimeth that ``All the world's a VAX'', and have no commerce with the benighted heathens who cling to this barbarous belief, that the days of thy program may be long even though the days of thy current machine be short.

thumb up for the English, though I absolutely have no idea what you are talking about :D

[TerryP]

Oh trust me, I couldn't write in that style of English if a love life depended on it <_<


It comes from an oldy called the ten commands of C programmers.



Basically what it means is if you assume all the world is using what you use, say for example -- you only use a 32-Bit Intel Pentium II with , so you write code that depends on that for something very intimate to that processor and it's hardware but does something really neat.


Then oh crap, you get a shiny new PC running a 128-Bit, 8 core, perfluorocarbon cooled AMD CPU screamin' for new programs.


You Foxtrot Uniform Charle Kilo'ed yourself and anyone else who wants to run your program without a lot of work.


Or what if your using a machine with an 8-Bit byte and a 8 byte word and then machines with 18-bit bytes and 8 byte words become all the rage? It's not likely for the size of a byte to actually change but it is arch dependent if I ever paid any attention.



The "All the world's a VAX" probably dates back to the days of the VAX machines and traditional C: to day I think a better choice of words would be "All the words a x86 (32-bit)" or "all the worlds a Pentium"


I don't think I've ever seen anything *really* stupid other then assumptions about the sizes of various types (or just disregard for possible differences) but ya never know these days !!!