gotcha
A misfeature of a system, especially a programming language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it both enticingly easy to invoke and completely unexpected and/or unreasonable in its outcome.
For example, a classic gotcha in C is the fact that if (a=b) {code;}
is syntactically valid and sometimes even correct. It puts
the value of "b" into "a" and then executes "code" if "a" is
non-zero. What the programmer probably meant was
if (a==b) {code;}
which executes "code" if "a" and "b" are equal.
[Jargon File]
Last updated: 1995-04-17
Nearby terms:
GOSMACS ♦ Gosperism ♦ GOSPL ♦ gotcha ♦ goto ♦ Gottlob Frege ♦ gov ♦ governance
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