> Absorb the damage That's funny. The code above got written that way because at my first job, I inherited a godawful business charting API written by the lea

> Absorb the damage That's funny. The code above got written that way because at my first job, I inherited a godawful business charting API written by the lead developer. The input to the API was a struct with 70-80 members that the caller had to fill in and there were no defaults for anything! Naturally there were not just scalars, but lots of arrays and strings in the struct, which could easily be overrun or often left null. The users, quite understandably, didn't fill out everything, which led to frequent crashes in _my_ code because that's where the pointers would get dereferenced. When they would see that the crash was not in their code, the users of the API would punt the error to me even though it was their bad input that caused the problem. This would happen 10-12 times a day. I rewrote the entire thing in a paranoid style , employing the trick above and others to try and ensure that if there was bad input, that it would always crash on their side of the fence. After I was done I got one legitimate bug report for the code, even though it was in use worldwide in our medium sized company.