Sometimes debugging someone elses program can be quite punnishing. Just the other day, one of my programmers was complaining that a piece of code wouldn't work. He had showed it to another programmer and together they spent over three hours trying to figure out why it didn't work. Other similar snippets of code worked OK, so they finally concluded that it had to be a bug in the database. So they call the Data Base Administrator, me, to come take a look. They demonstrated the miscreant behaviour of this little bit of code, so I had them byte off a copy of that code so that I could chew on it a bit.
Sure enough, the code misbehaved the same way. But then when I compared the one piece that worked with the one that didn't, I noticed a telltale tail on one of the periods. Sure enough, what I was looking at was a comma disguising itself as a period. In fact it was a ...