From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2004-12-15T22:55:56+09:00
Subject: Re: [BUG] unknown node type 0 - SERIOUS ENOUGH TO MIGRATE AWAY FROM RUBY?

Andrew Walrond wrote:

>This is a long standing bug in Ruby, and has been reported hundreds of times 
>by myself and many other people, but never addressed. Unfortunately, the 
>usual response is "Give a small code example reproducing the problem", which 
>is impossible (given the nature of the bug), so it gets overlooked.
>
>Common themes seem to be
>
>1) Its pretty random
>2) Changing a source file, even by adding white space, often causes the 
>problem to appear/dissappear
>3) Test cases are worthless. It will undoutedly work on your machine. This is 
>undoutedly some sort of nasty random read/write scribble bug.
>  
>
The problem is that if you cannot reproduce the bug on demand then how 
on earth is anyone going to see what is happening so that they can fix 
it and how are they going to be able to test that their fix has indeed 
worked. Without a clue as to how the bug is generated then what exactly 
do you expect people to do?

The problem can only be addressed if you can show it to someone, thus 
"Give a small code example reproducing the problem"