From: spamtrap42@jacob21819.net   
      
   On 2026-01-04, Niklas Karlsson  wrote:   
   > On 2026-01-04, Peter Flass  wrote:   
   >>   
   >> I look at some code and wonder "how the heck has this ever worked?", but   
   >> the answer is that no one ever hit that combination of things before, or   
   >> used that option.   
   >   
   > That's certainly the sensible explanation, but I've had scenarios like   
   > that, even with my own code from the past, where I could swear up and   
   > down that I myself had successfully used that code in the exact scenario   
   > that would obviously break.   
      
   Around the middle 1980s, I heard an apocryphal story at my first   
   employer that at one time their IC layout Connectivity   
   Verification System would work perfectly every day of the week   
   except Wednesday, and it would very quickly crash out in hideous   
   ways if anyone attempted to use it on a Wednesday.  The program   
   was written in MAINSAIL (Machine INdependent Stanford Artificial   
   Intelligence Language) from a vendor called Xidak.  Reportedly,   
   the root cause of the Wednesday problem was that somewhere in the   
   depths of the language runtime or support software, 8 characters   
   had been allocated for the name of the day of the week.   
      
   --   
   Robert Riches   
   spamtrap42@jacob21819.net   
   (Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)