3 ms·
> To be not defective, the software has to explicitly reject input that it was not designed to handle. In some cases that breaks forward capability. e.g. the
by jsymolon 8y ago
> To be not defective, the software has to explicitly reject input that it was not designed to handle.
In some cases that breaks forward capability. e.g. the case where there is an unknown XML tag. You could reject the tag or message. You'll end up rejecting all future change inputs.
If the whitelist of acceptable items is large, it may be acceptable to have a black list however if the above holds, you don't know what you don't know.
- lowercased 8y agoThe middle ground may be explicitly flag/indicate/log that an unknown situation has been encountered, and 'handle' that by doing something useful (continuing to work without crashing, preventing known "unknown" data from being processed silently, etc). It may not help with forward compat entirely, but it would be explicitly known (and I'd think would be somewhat easier to modify/extend for known unknowns in the future).