Find the Bug A Book of Incorrect Programs

Classification Used in This Book

In the existing writing on programming, many articles attempt to classify bugs into types. In fact, there have been roughly as many classifications as articles. One notable feature of the bug classification literature is that everyone feels the need to devise his or her own system.

The categorization in this book is based on one devised by Donald Knuth, who is the author of the typesetting package known as T_eX (although as befits the field, I'll make some changes to his categories).

Knuth is an expert programmer who kept a detailed log of all the code changes he made during the development of T_eX—both bugs and enhancements. He later wrote a paper called “The Errors of T_eX” in which he grouped the changes into ...