4 ms·

It should be noted that this might not have been a coder error, but a merge conflict. Nobody should be reprimanded in that case, since it's nobody's fault (exce

• jobu 12y ago
  This is exactly what I thought when I first saw the Apple bug, and I was surprised that the author didn't mention this at all. He's blaming the programming language here, but I have yet to see a language where a single line accidentally duplicated or transposed by a merge tool couldn't cause the same problem.
  • wpaprocki 12y ago
    Well, in Python, if you duplicate a return statement, then your code will recognize only the first statement. This, for example, will return 1: def func(): return 1 return 2 If the code from the goto fail example was written in Python so as to return an object when a condition was met, and it ended up with 2 return statements, then Python would have just returned the first one in the proper scope and moved on. Of course, this still depends on implementation in the code itself.
    • eyeface 12y ago
      If we're talking about returns, then C/C++ would behave the same way. The second return is unreachable. A duplicated line that isn't idempotent and that doesn't jump out of the current scope would be problematic.
  • peterashford 12y ago
    Java (if it had gotos) would not have compiled this code because it doesn't allow unreachable code.
    • jobu 12y ago
      In the Apple SSL bug, a goto statement works much like a function call or a throw in Java. Here's a Java example that compiles without warning and has the same flaw: public static void foo() throws Exception { throw new Exception(); } public static int bar() throws Exception { int x = 0; if(x == 1) foo(); foo(); x++; return x; }