| RHF Joke Archives |

We always liked to talk about the bugs that depended on the phase of the moon. So, when Guy Steele wrote the Rabbit compiler, which is a scheme compiler, he made it print out a comment at the beginning which showed the time it was could always look. If you had a bug that depended on the phase of the moon, you could look at the thing and see at what phase of the moon it was compiled, and that might help you figure out what went wrong.

Eventually, he got a bug report about a certain program that had been compiled once, and worked, and when it was compiled at another time it didn't work. So, he looked and he discovered that when the initial comments were printed out, the LISP feature that would automatically put in a line break if a line got too long was activated on one occasion, because the phase of the moon took too many characters to print out. So, it triggered that feature, and the last part of the phase of the moon was on another line, and therefore it wasn't marked by comments. So it was just sitting t here in a file, whereas at another time the phase of the moon didn't take up so many characters, and the whole thing was properly commented. So, this was a bug that actually depended on the phase of the moon. You can take that as a final thought.

[This was originally told by RMS at http://www.linuxcare.com/news_columns/interviews/index.epl]

| RHF Joke Archives |