4min chapter

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Episode 520: John Ousterhout on A Philosophy of Software Design

Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

CHAPTER

Defining Errors in Special Cases Out of Existence

This is a principle that can be applied sometimes, but i have noticed as i see people using it, they often misapply it. So let me first talk about how you cant apply it, then we can talk about how its how its being misapplied. One of them was the unset command in the tickle scriptling language. When i wrote tickle, i thought no one in their right mind would ever deled a variable that doesn't exist. That's got to be an error. And so i threw an exception whenever somebody deledes a variable at Doesn't exist. Well, it turns out people do this all the time. A better and even better example,

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