From: tnp@invalid.invalid   
      
   On 06/01/2026 03:31, Robert Riches wrote:   
   > 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.   
   >   
   It was Mac OS-x where all filenames were in upper case, until they   
   allowed lower case too...   
      
     ..whereupon no program at all would then work and the use of 'strings'   
   revealed why. The same application would randomly use upper, lower or   
   camel case to refer to the same filename...safe in the certain knowledge   
   that the OS would translate it all to upper case. Except when it didn't.   
      
      
      
   --   
   "Women actually are capable of being far more than the feminists will   
   let them."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)