Oh, terrific, some ancient program in C, where somebody cobbled in a poorly designed and untested C version of JSON.stringify(). That is 21st century craniorec

Oh, terrific, some ancient program in C, where somebody cobbled in a poorly designed and untested C version of JSON.stringify(). That is 21st century craniorectal inversion, not decades-old tech debt. I started out working in that era (no COBOL, but all the rest of it). At least some of us were suspicious of data-in-a-few-characters and character column-number based records (ummm, punchcards). Some of us checked all kinds of things on input to try to reject garbage. Spaces in the middle of numbers? BOOM. Something unexpected in the "record type" letter? BOOM. The card reader actually had a diversion output tray where we could spit out the rejected cards. But, still, lots of bad stuff got through.