Wednesday, May 03, 2006

On Error Resume Next

Maybe I am wrong – but I think that I’ve never seen any programming statement more stupid and more evil than the notorious Basic line:

ON ERROR RESUME NEXT

I never could understand what made someone to introduce such an abomination into the language. Was it a momentary lapse of reason, a stupid joke or just an act of pure and random malice? Anyway, it’s horrible – but even more horrible are the two facts:

a) This thing is still in the language, and
b) Some people are still using it!

I’ve just spent several long hours looking at an ASP page and trying to understand why it behaves so strangely? I usually don’t use ASP – and totally forgot about this little gem. Finally when I discovered that whoever created the page put “ON ERROR RESUME NEXT” in the very beginning. I removed it – and immediately the true source of errors became obvious. It’s good that this page was just a part of an online store – and not of something more important…

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