Protip: Don't do either. And definitely don't do the first. Explicit is always better than implicit defaults that get used instead when you give it a wrong val

Protip: Don't do either. And definitely don't do the first. Explicit is always better than implicit defaults that get used instead when you give it a wrong value that you think is correct. What you should do is throw your hands up early, fail to parse, and have a very clearly defined process and protocol to handle files that couldn't be loaded. It'll force you to ask yourself very difficult questions that aren't covered by either of the two options you posted. The real failure in the recent Crowdstrike kernel-mode driver failing to parse some def/config file is that the dev/product owner/BA didn't ask "what happens if we try load a file that's invalid?"