[Edinburgh-pm] a Perl surprise

[Miles Gould]

On 18/07/12 19:12, Jeff Parsons wrote:
> Eek. Robustness isn't about stopping other programmers from making
> syntax errors. Robustness generally is where software will catch a lot
> of issues and do plenty of checks. Ie, software that's not robust just
> makes a whole bunch of assumptions about the data it's working with,
> then things can just mysteriously go wrong. Robust software checks
> *everything* and then informs the user/programmer if it has something it
> didn't expect. Robustness is for preventing the programmers/users from
> misusing an interface, not for preventing them from making syntax errors.

Nick's thinking like a language designer: from that perspective, syntax 
errors in user code *are* assumption-violations, which the user should 
be informed about :-)

Miles