5 ms·
I would disagree with that greatly. Postel's law says there's no need to excessively constrain what's considered valid input, not to ignore basic bounds checki
by GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
I would disagree with that greatly. Postel's law says there's no need to excessively constrain what's considered valid input, not to ignore basic bounds checking and security.
Not following Postel's law would result in brittle system components that break when other parts of the system evolve.
- eudox 10y ago>Not following Postel's law would reult in brittle system components that break when other parts of the system evolve. Being liberal in what you accept is precisely the definition of brittle: if there's an update that reduces the set of representable input data, but you keep the code that processes the user's input into data, then an untested, little-used edge case could invalidate your assumptions about the rest of the system.
- pbh101 10y ago>Not following Postel's law would result in brittle system components that break when other parts of the system evolve. This depends how much graceful degradation you have available to you. In systems/domains where little is available, following Postel's law can result in silent failures rather than explicit/loud ones. The question isn't whether they break or how brittle they are, but whether you will notice whether they did break. Each system exists within a range on a continuum of how acceptable Postel's law is.
- catnaroek 10y agoAlso, just because Postel's law worked for a small group of highly skilled systems programmers implementing common infrastructure for everyone, it doesn't automatically follow that it will work for a large and fast growing group of programmers of wildly varying skill, each implementing their own or their employer's brilliant business idea.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]