Stop the clock, squash the bug

If this blog were what I once meant it to be, I would want it to look like Word Aligned, and to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I translated an article from that extraordinary blog into Spanish. I hope you enjoy it (even the less technical among you). (*)

Stop the clock, squash the bug¹

By Thomas Guest (Word Aligned)

Which clock is the best?

We can easily rule the one which has stopped … Or can we? In “The Rectory Umbrella” Lewis Carroll argues otherwise.²

None of these clocks is much good. The first has stopped, the second loses a second every minute, the third gains a second every minute. At least it’s easy to see the problem with the first: we won’t be tempted to patch it.

Original article in English

Translator’s notes

(*) This article was originally published in July 2008, but you know what happened; this version has a few corrections.

As the author points out, it is not correct that trying to request 4294967295 bytes causes an error: malloc returns NULL in the event of a failure, and the standard C++ operator new is defined to throw the bad_alloc exception.

Images taken from Word Aligned, from the original article.