Andrew Coppin wrote:
Obviously there is no way in hell this code path can ever be executed.
Ah, the number of times I've thought that and been wrong :) From a simplistic perspective what I think you're asking for is to have obscure occasions when your program goes wrong with random consequences and doesn't give you an error message. This a programmer's worst nightmare. I can think of several dimensions of bug difficulty When the bug exhibits: Hard : Infrequent at run-time. Medium : Frequent at run-time. Easy : Compile-time. Reproducible: Hard : No obvious pattern or way to induce the error. Medium : A reasonably strong correlation with some precursor. Easy : Happens every time you do a particular thing. Error message: Hard : No error message. Medium : Non-specific error message. Easy : Error message that relates to an identifiable point in your program with relevant state information. Error message location: Medium : Appears on the screen. Easy : Shown on screen and recorded in a log file. Where it happens: Hard : Only on your user's machine or with their configuration. Easy : On all machines. By classifying error messages, for bugs which you have stated are infrequent and difficult to reproduce, as not needing to be displayed or logged you have pushed all these bugs into the seriously hard category. By adding 'undefined' subsequent behaviour you have made these bugs even more difficult. What we should be doing is pushing every bug in the opposite direction - towards the easy end of all the above dimensions. Richard.