U
sed humorou
sly a
s a random parameter on which
something i
s said to depend.
sometime
s implie
s unreliability of whatever i
s dependent, or that reliability
seem
s to be dependent on condition
s nobody ha
s been able to determine. "Thi
s feature depend
s on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo
switch
set, and on the pha
se of the moon."
see al
so
heisenbug. True
story: Once upon a time there wa
s a
bug that really did depend on the pha
se of the moon. There wa
s a little
subroutine that had traditionally been u
sed in variou
s program
s at
MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon'
s true pha
se.
GLs incorporated thi
s routine into a
Lisp program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a time
stamp line almo
st 80 character
s long. Very occa
sionally the fir
st line of the me
ssage would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file wa
s later read back in the program would
barf. The length of the fir
st line depended on both the preci
se date and time and the length of the pha
se
specification when the time
stamp wa
s printed, and
so the bug literally depended on the pha
se of the moon! The fir
st paper edition of the
Jargon File (
steele-1983) included an example of one of the time
stamp line
s that exhibited thi
s bug, but the type
setter "corrected" it. Thi
s ha
s since been de
scribed a
s the pha
se-of-the-moon-bug bug. [
Jargon File] (1995-02-22)
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