Re: ADOM causing illegal operations

On Tue, 02 Dec 2003 08:29:13 +0000, anxious triffid wrote:

> "Josh Singh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in 
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> 
>> Chaos Master writes:
>>> While I was playing a very good gnomish elementalist, ADOM gave an
>>> illegal operation. Now I get illegal operations at random. I'm
>>> playing ADOM with Togu's patch to cure uber-monsters. Anyone here had
>>> the same problem with illegal operations?
>> 
>> It can't be at random. A computer isn't people. Retrace your steps,
>> carefully, and perhaps you'll notice something you've done each time.
>> 
> 
> Define 'random'.

Easy. Something which cannot be predicted ahead by looking at its previous
states. A computer program is predictable by essence, so it is not
random.

Of course, some bugs that rely on accumulated error (buffer overflows) may
_seem_ random to the user in the sense that they don't always show up
"at the same place". That doesn't mean the program's behaviour is random,
just that it is not apparent from the user's interface to the program.

And that's what we have debuggers for. :-)

-- 
Aki Rossi