On Sun, 02 Jun 2013 23:23:42 -0400, Jason Swails wrote: > On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 11:10 PM, Dan Sommers <d...@tombstonezero.net> > wrote:
>> Ah, yes. The Heisenbug. ;-) > > Indeed. Being in the field of computational chemistry/physics, I was > almost happy to have found one just to say I was hunting a Heisenbug. > It seems to be a term geared more toward the physics-oriented > programming crowd. I'd been using the word Heisenbug for years with only a pop-culture clue as to what it meant. Many years later, I went to college, studied physics (and math), and had one self-study semester of computational physics on my way to my undergraduate degree. After a career in software development, including a few years in the financial industry, with lots of floating point economic models, I must say that it was very enlightening. >> They're much harder to see in the wild with Python. > > Yea, I've only run into Heisenbugs with Fortran or C/C++. Every time > I've seen one it's been due to an uninitialized variable somewhere -- > something valgrind is quite good at pinpointing ... Uninitialized variables and off-by-one pointer operations. Little can screw up a calculation like mistaking a stack frame link for a floating point number. :-) > ... (And yes, a good portion of our code is -still- in Fortran -- but > at least it's F90+ :). I am a huge proponent of using the right tool for the job. There is nothing wrong with some well-placed FORTRAN, as long as the PSF -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
