Gotcha
<jargon, programming> 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]
