It was intentionally hyperbolic tongue in cheek and understood to be as such. The reason is to fight through the discounting people (at least at the time) had t

It was intentionally hyperbolic tongue in cheek and understood to be as such. The reason is to fight through the discounting people (at least at the time) had that UB was just a segfault or something. Here’s a kernel exploit that was a result of UB [1]. It’s not hard to imagine that hypothetically UB in the kernel could result in “just so” corruption that would call the “format your HDD routine” even if in practice it’s extremely unlikely (& forensically it would basically be impossible to prove that it was UB that caused it). https://lwn.net/Articles/342330/ https://lwn.net/Articles/342330/