Interestingly enough, no one correctly guessed why I needed code in the compiler to transform a method argument list into a form that batched up the side effecting expressions, stuck their values in variables, and then called the method with the...

Upon submitting that specification for review, even before seeing my code, Chris found a bug and an omission. The omission is that I neglected to say what happens when the ref variable is an index into a fixed-size array buffer. As it turns out,...

Joel had a great series of articles many years ago about the benefits of writing functional specifications, that is, specifications of how the product looks to its users. I want to talk a bit about technical specifications, that is, a specification of...

Thanks to everyone who left thoughtful and insightful comments on last week's post. More countries really ought to implement Instant Runoff Voting; it would certainly appeal to the geek crowd. Many people left complex opinions of the form "I'd...

I don't know why I haven't blogged about this one before; this is the single most common incorrect bug report we get. That is, someone thinks they have found a bug in the compiler, but in fact the compiler is correct and their code is wrong. That's a...