What’s a Bug?
Pretty much everyone has had a program crash. A standard story is that you were typing in a paper when, all of a sudden, your word processor crashed. You had forgotten to save, and you had to start all over again. Old versions of Microsoft Windows used to crash more often than they should have, showing the dreaded “blue screen of death.” (Happily, they’ve gotten a lot better in the past several years.) Usually, your computer shows some kind of cryptic error message when a program crashes.
What happened in each case is that the people who wrote the program told the computer to do something it couldn’t do: open a file that didn’t exist, perhaps, or keep track of more information than the computer could handle, or maybe repeat a ...
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