re: #174 iossarian

Off-by-one errors must be some of the most frequent bugs in programming. I mean, it’s already quite a challenge to code some relatively simple offset-based algorithms correctly and always give the right answer*, even before you get into questions of whether to start counting at 1 or 0.

* I used to get very smart undergraduates in the early stages of CS degrees to write binary search algorithms over sorted lists, and it’s remarkable how easy it is to introduce quite subtle bugs into even that example.

Did you ever get them into anything *really* esoteric like trying to debug an isolated field or buffer overflow? (shudder)