At 03:56 AM 3/1/01 -0500, Michael G Schwern wrote: >A friend of mine was talking about how old WWII era analog fire >computers, mechanical devices which calculated how much powder and at >what angle a ship's main guns must be fired at. They had a special >switch, "Battle Mode". In this mode, the computer would never stop. >It would ignore all errors and just keep cranking out numbers. It might >give wrong answers, it might melt down, but it would never stop. In >the middle of a fight, you don't want your fire computer to crash. > >Asserts use this sort of philosophy, which is why they have an NDEBUG >flag which allows you to shut them off program-wide. > >PERL_BATTLE_MODE environment variable anyone? ;) $SIG{__DIE__} = sub { die $ENV{PERL_BATTLE_MODE} ? <<"FNORD" : shift}; Python 1.5.2 (#1, Feb 1 2000, 16:32:16) [GCC egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs- on $^O Copyright 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam SyntaxError: invalid syntax FNORD -- Peter Scott Pacific Systems Design Technologies