Strangest language feature

Question

What is, in your opinion, the most surprising, weird, strange or really "WTF" language feature you have encountered?

Please only one feature per answer.

Answer 1

Don't know if it can be considered a language feature, but, in C++ almost any compiler error related to templates delivers a fair amount of WTF to many C++ programmers around the world on daily basis :)

Answer 2

The JavaScript octal conversion 'feature' is a good one to know about:

parseInt('06') // 6
parseInt('07') // 7
parseInt('08') // 0
parseInt('09') // 0
parseInt('10') // 10

More details here.

Answer 3

For those who don't know, bc is an "arbitrary precision calculator language", and I use it quite often for quick calculations, particularly when the numbers involved are large ($ is the prompt):

$ bc -lq
12^345
20774466823273785598434446955827049735727869127052322369317059031795\
19704325276892191015329301807037794598378537132233994613616420526484\
93077727371807711237016056649272805971389591721704273857856298577322\
13812114239610682963085721433938547031679267799296826048444696211521\
30457090778409728703018428147734622401526422774317612081074841839507\
864189781700150115308454681772032

bc has been a standard Unix command for a long time.

Now for the "WTF feature". This is from man bc (emphasis mine):

quit: When the quit statement is read, the bc processor is terminated, regardless of where the quit statement is found. For example, "if (0 == 1) quit" will cause bc to terminate.

halt: The halt statement (an extension) is an executed statement that causes the bc processor to quit only when it is executed. For example, "if (0 == 1) halt" will not cause bc to terminate because the halt is not executed.

Answer 4

JavaScript is object oriented, right? So running methods on literal strings and numbers should work. Like "hello".toUpperCase() and 3.toString(). Turns out that second one is a syntax error, why? Because the parser expects a number followed by a dot to be a floating point literal. That's not the WTF, the WTF is that you only have to add another dot to make it work:

3..toString()

The reason is that the literal 3. is interpreted as 3.0, and 3.0.toString() works fine.

Answer 5

Fun with auto boxing and the integer cache in Java:

Integer foo = 1000;
Integer bar = 1000;

foo <= bar; // true
foo >= bar; // true
foo == bar; // false

//However, if the values of foo and bar are between 127 and -128 (inclusive)
//the behaviour changes:

Integer foo = 42;
Integer bar = 42;

foo <= bar; // true
foo >= bar; // true
foo == bar; // true

---

Explanation

A quick peek at the Java source code will turn up the following:

/**
 * Returns a <tt>Integer</tt> instance representing the specified
 * <tt>int</tt> value.
 * If a new <tt>Integer</tt> instance is not required, this method
 * should generally be used in preference to the constructor
 * {@link #Integer(int)}, as this method is likely to yield
 * significantly better space and time performance by caching
 * frequently requested values.
 *
 * @param  i an <code>int</code> value.
 * @return a <tt>Integer</tt> instance representing <tt>i</tt>.
 * @since  1.5
 */
public static Integer valueOf(int i) {
    if (i >= -128 && i <= IntegerCache.high)
        return IntegerCache.cache[i + 128];
    else
        return new Integer(i);
}

Note: IntegerCache.high defaults to 127 unless set by a property.

What happens with auto boxing is that both foo and bar the same integer object retrieved from the cache unless explicitly created: e.g. foo = new Integer(42), thus when comparing reference equality, they will be true rather than false. The proper way of comparing Integer value is using .equals;

Answer 6

Duff's device in C!

In C one can interlace a do/while with a switch statement. Here an example of a memcpy using this method:

void duff_memcpy( char* to, char* from, size_t count ) {
    size_t n = (count+7)/8;
    switch( count%8 ) {
    case 0: do{ *to++ = *from++;
    case 7:     *to++ = *from++;
    case 6:     *to++ = *from++;
    case 5:     *to++ = *from++;
    case 4:     *to++ = *from++;
    case 3:     *to++ = *from++;
    case 2:     *to++ = *from++;
    case 1:     *to++ = *from++;
            }while(--n>0);
    }
}