Haunted by ancient history

Posted Jan 10, 2015 1:07 UTC (Sat) by moltonel (guest, #45207)
In reply to: Haunted by ancient history by flussence
Parent article: Haunted by ancient history

If the change can go unnoticed (in other words if the value is good enough) you can be sure that some naive programmer will use it for new work. Using bogomips was already "obviously wrong" 10 years ago, and programmers still used it.

If you want naive programmers to notice you need an even wrong-er value like "1" or "not implemented", but that'll raise compatibility red flags. But if those wrong-er values are configurable...