Re: Should undefined behavior be encouraged in Emacs?

[Dave Abrahams]

on Mon Oct 03 2011, Richard Stallman <rms-AT-gnu.org> wrote:

>     > In simple cases such as (goto-char -5), users tend to see what the
>     > behavior is, and are likely to write code that depends on it, even if
>     > it isn't documented.  Thus, leaving it undocumented doesn't mean that
>     > we can change it and nobody will notice.
>
>     If you make it a hard, inescapable error, that won't happen.
>
> That is true; this would pressure everyone to carefully make sure not
> to supply out-of-range arguments.  But is that goal really more
> desirable than the convenience of rounding out-of-range arguments?

I would say it depends on the argument and its meaning.  I remember when
I was working on a MIDI sequencer whose routines would assert that all
times used were nonnegative.  For my code, that was a major PITA.  I
would say the same probably applies to character positions.

Other arguments can't be so easily rounded (an int passed where a string
is expected), and probably some that can just shouldn't be
(e.g. indexing a vector).

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com