Thread: help! string literals

Originally Posted by Meldreth

but it's ok if it gives wrong results as if they were right.

I think that what vart is getting at is that the behaviour is unspecified for an unmatched double quote. It did take some time for cakestler to even specify what was meant by a "string literal".

EDIT:

Originally Posted by Meldreth

you think a program can give incorrect results on incorrect input but shouldn't ever crash.

If the behaviour is undefined, then the output would not be wrong.

Originally Posted by Meldreth

silently wrong output can be mistaken for correct output, a crash can't be overlooked.

That is not an argument in favour of a crash though. Both incorrect output and crashes are Bad Things.

Generally, it is more annoying, however, if a program crashes since it loses all its state, what you've entered, and so on.
Incorrect output might not be as extreme as that, but it is true that it might too be Bad. Although usually, another bad thing is behind the wrong output, such as undefined behavior. And that, as we know, is pretty much the worst thing of all things.