Does God have BUGS?? by Tony Hasemer Hooray for bugs. Bugs are great. Bugs are the only things which keep any of my halfway decent programs from being boringly, frustratingly finished. If I one day win the Nobel Prize for Artificial Intelligence, and in my next incarnation return as a computer program, I shall be a bug. The trouble is, bugs are a bit like dogs. They need someone to belong to. And, whilst your own bugs are a source of endless happy late-night hacking by the light of a guttering candle (your beloved having switched off the lights at the mains), other people's bugs are anathema. Oh, how we love to sneer, even to laugh hysterically, at the pathetic catastrophes to which other people's programs are prone - especially if we've just paid #400 for them. But where our own programs are concerned, the obsessive search for the next bug can reach manic proportions unless satisfied. It resembles nothing so much as the addict's yearning for the next shot of heroin. I'm sure you've seen them, in the cold turkey of severe bug-withdrawal. Ashen faced and red-eyed, unable to focus except at eighteen inches, sticky blobs from countless Mars bars all down the fronts of their anoraks. And, if appropriate, needing a shave like RumpelStiltskin. These are not human beings. These are the first generation of high-memory mainliners, the bitmap freaks whose creepy proselytising destroyed civilisation on Altair IV. And a good thing too, most people thought. Let's face it (no, not that, Johnnie - I'm over here) how many of us would have the slightest interest in programming if it weren't for the bugs? If every program you wrote worked first time and with immaculate efficiency, would you be any more interested in writing it than you are in, say, doing the washing up? >Tony. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------