The Monthly "fP Sucks" rant thread :-)

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 01:57:11PM -0400, Fairlight wrote:
> > Not quite.  The routines used by blobfix are loaded with "sanity checks" at
> > every step along the way.  If an "insane" value appears, such as a negative
> > offset, or a block number past EOF, it stops reading that particular object.
> 
> The question is, how did the code let those insane values get there in the
> first place, and why?  A fix program is a bandaid, not a vaccine.

And filepro is *loaded* with places where data should be sanity checked
but is not, usually because fp assumes that it's the only one touching
its files.

That hasn't been a reasonable assumption since ABE became able to be
set to ASCII... but do *any* of the programs react sanely to finding a
line of code with a number of colons other than 3?

Not as of 5.0.14.  Ghod help you if you put a colon in a prompt and
forget to escape it.

Broken termcap entries can send you into segfaultville.

Inadvertantly using commands as code labels doesn't throw an exception,
it just makes things break, oddly.  (I once named a routine "select".)

And insert my standard rant about non-first-class semantics here (see
also the recent "how do I loop over the fields of an insert" thread and
my reply if you need more on that.

The usual responses are "there's a workaround" and "Well, don't do
that, then."

But are those really reasonable responses WRT a developer tool with the
prices filePro has?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
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