🚀 go-pugleaf

In light of the stupid user discussion, how about a discussion of stupid and
embarrassing programming errors.

A number of years ago, I was working my way through school at a small company
who performed physical inventories.  I was responsible for programming and any
other computer related work (having a DP staff of me).

I wrote an application for a particular client who wanted to download a list
of product identifiers so that data from the inventory could be validated.  I
received a test tape of these product IDs and proceeded to develop a sexy 
recursive function to insert the IDs into a linear list.  Everything
worked fine
on the test data.  I had a habit of showing up at the first inventory that was
using a new system, and so when the crew leader started up the application, and
it promptly blew up, I was there to fix it.  I looked at the error message and
found the dreaded "Stack overflow"; the test tape only had a SAMPLE of the real
data (about 1%) and the recursing had filled up the stack with function calls.
I quickly wrote a safe iterative function to build the list while the crew-
leader kept the store manager busy.

Needless to say, I never write production code with recursive functions 
anymore.

--
Gordon Edwards                                    Mead Data Central, Dayton OH