Lies in education [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Sat, 14 Oct 2017 01:30 am, Chris Angelico wrote:

>> For a novice, seeing 'Segmentation fault (core dumped)' is better?
> 
> Better than silently doing nothing? YES. Absolutely it is.

Chris, you forget that for Bart, his user-base is only himself. If he programs
his home-made system to silently ignore writes to write-protected memory,
that counts as the "...unless explicitly silenced" part of "Errors should
never pass silently...". If that means his software is riddled with bugs, it
will affect only himself, and no novices will be harmed.

But in any case, a seg fault is a pretty crude and dangerous way to report
errors. It isn't so much an error report as the *consequences* of the error,
a bit like your car engine seizing up because you forgot to put oil in it.


-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.