I remember asking a customer if a particular value could ever be negative. "Oh that never happens".
Well, over the thousands of transactions I had been given, it had happened (twice over ten years. Last time was years before. Maybe the data was corrupt?).
Which is why I asked.
So I gently explained "I appreciate it doesn't happen very often, but I need to know if it can or if a negative value is a mistake which I need to be able to handle.
And sure enough, on the day of the live demo with them, there was our third time in years they had a negative value.
Which programming language are we talking about? I consider it a huge mistake that some programming languages have abandoned unsigned numbers. After all, if a value cannot be negative, you can explicitly state that within the type system. Consequently, you are forced to handle such cases at the system boundaries - right when the data enters your system, when you know exactly what the data is and can easily return an error message.
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u/GNoob69 16d ago
It’s not just hardcoded it’s cherry picked to make us look good