Yes, in C or C++, code will just randomly explode. That's a completely accurate description. Once upon a time we had reports from our users that our software

Yes, in C or C++, code will just randomly explode. That's a completely accurate description. Once upon a time we had reports from our users that our software had deleted all of the files it could on their C:\ drive. Investigating, we found the code that caused it, something to the effect of: string rootDirectoryToDelete; // Set it reasonably: rootDirectoryToDelete = tempDirectoryWeMadeEarlier; Want to guess what happened? We had a mix of Emacs and Microsoft Visual Studio 6 developers, and somehow we ended up with a mix of carriage return / line feed in that source file. Both Emacs and the MSVS6 IDE showed those as three separate lines... but the MSVS6 compiler thought that the comment... had no terminator. So it took the assignment on the next line as just being part of the comment. You bet your ass I worry about code blowing up in my face. I write unit tests to try to protect myself. I can't tell you how many times whatever the "undefined behavior" was what the code depended on, and fixing it required some severe re-working. I also can't tell you how often someone thought "const" meant "completely immutable," and then they went on to accidentally modify what the const pointer was pointing at. Or how often I've had to fix someone else's race condition. Or how often a driver crash has clobbered me. I came across functionally like this in our code: int i = 2; int b = 3; printf("i = %d, b = %d\n", (i, b)); Want to guess what that does? (i, b) evaluates i, and then ignores it, and returns b. So it basically prints "i = 3, b = [core dump.]" The MSVS6 compiler gave a nice juicy warning on that line that everyone ignored. Yes, using the MSVS6 compiler was dumb, and ignoring the warnings was dumb, but guess what? I'm not in charge of how dumb my co-workers are, or how strict everyone's deadlines are, and bugs like this are actually kind of hard to find in a real code base with tons of problems going on. I'll take some more predictable behavior, if someone's offering it; yes, please.