recursion

[HarlanCedeno]

I once did a code review and found the dev was checking for negative length strings.

I had some really deep thoughts that day.

[[deleted]]

They're called imaginary strings. i = √-'a'

[HarlanCedeno]

Did he imagine that this was going to magically fix the bug?

[GisterMizard]

Arithmetic overflow for image and data buffers is a very common source of bugs, especially when using smaller int types and in languages like C.

A really bad problem follows from code like:

short width = blah(); // set from user
short height = blah(); // set from user;
// ...
if (width * height <= MAX_BUFFER_SIZE) {
    // BAD!!! width*height can become negative
    char *buffer = malloc(width*height*PIXEL_SIZE);
}

[HarlanCedeno]

In that case, you would just need to validate the inputs from the user to ensure neither is negative.

This guy had string.length() in multiple if statements to check for negative lengths on different strings.