Re: ihave and server upgrades

[Arnt Gulbrandsen <[e-mail]>]

>> I don't suppose there's anything to do about it, but it still riles me.
>
> Me too. In fact I had to deal with exactly this case recently because 
> I just improved checking of tagged arguments in our implementation. 
> And I have to agree there's nothing to be done about it.

Heh. Improve it to handle this.

Consider the extensions random, which provides a test which returns true 
or false randomly, and well, which provides a tag for fileinto.

require [ "random", "ihave" ];
if anyof( random, not ihave "well" ) {
     fileinto :well "a";
} elsif random {
     fileinto :well "b";
} else {
     fileinto :well "c";
}

Two of those three blocks are bad. Which ones? I have NOT improved my 
code to the point of handling this.

> A similar case I've seen come up many times over the years  is that of 
> scripting languages that allow abbreviations. So you write something 
> like this in a script:
>
>    $ rec foo

(REXX?)

> I suppose another way to think of it is as an untested code path 
> which, when finally activated, is found to contain a bug. But thqt 
> doesn't provide much solace either.

No... I hate it when person x changing something here breaks something 
for person y over there. Too great potential for sending either/both of 
them chasing wild geese.

Arnt