> The bug is in this line: > In Programming Pearls Bentley says that the analogous line "sets m to the average of l and u, truncated down to the nearest intege

> The bug is in this line: > In Programming Pearls Bentley says that the analogous line "sets m to the average of l and u, truncated down to the nearest integer." On the face of it, this assertion might appear correct, but it fails for large values of the int variables low and high. Specifically, it fails if the sum of low and high is greater than the maximum positive int value (231 - 1). The sum overflows to a negative value, and the value stays negative when divided by two. In C this causes an array index out of bounds with unpredictable results. In Java, it throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. At some point we have to draw an arbitrary line. Even an "arbitrary precision" calculation is bounded by system memory. "bug" is not well-defined, or perhaps "bug" is more of a continuous label as opposed to discrete.