C Programmer's Disease
n. 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
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 done his bit to
satisfy the user's (unreasonable) demands, and often affords the
user multiple opportunities to explore the marvelous 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.
