C Programmer's Disease
<programming> The tendency of the undisciplined C programmer to set
arbitrary but supposedly generous static limits on table sizes (defined, if
you're lucky, by constants in header files) rather than taking the trouble to do
proper dynamic storage allocation. If an application user later needs to put 68
elements into a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer reasons that he or
she can easily reset the table size to 68 (or even as much as 70, to allow for
future expansion) and recompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable
feeling of having made the effort to satisfy the user's (unreasonable) demands,
and often affords the user multiple opportunities to explore the marvellous
consequences of fandango on core. In severe cases of the disease, the programmer
cannot comprehend why each fix of this kind seems only to further disgruntle the
user.
[Jargon File]
(2001-12-31)
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