On the futility of error checking (anecdotal)

If one always writes suffixes with underscores, this kind of thing can be easier: 1e64 is plausible, but 1_e64 is weird enough to be reasonable to lint against.

This reminds me of

where the lint was added quickly, and is another place where that was only possible to lint thanks to the underscore -- linting on 432 would be too aggressive, but 4_32 isn't what people meant to say. (AFAIK 12_34_56_789 and 123_456_789 are used, but 1_23_45_67_89 is at least rare.)

5 Likes