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Re:This should never happen by Someone1234 on Thursday March 31, 2016 @10:32AM (#11397425)
I agree that it does demonstrate defensive programming.

But can I also just add that the error message remains unhelpful and outright "bad." You should absolutely have checks for "impossible" situations, but when those checks fail you need some way of determining which check failed (and cannot always assume you'll have stack backtrace, in particular if an end-user is telling you the error message).

For example you could do this: "Impossible Error in GetName(): {Exception}"

Re:This should never happen by estsauver on Thursday March 31, 2016 @10:55AM (#11397611)
In a lot of these cases they probably know they'll have access to stack traces/Exception monitoring.
Re:This should never happen by igravious on Thursday March 31, 2016 @10:43AM (#11397523)
Rather than "Impossible […]: {Exception}", how about "Regrettable and Extremely Rare […]: {Programmer Will Be Fired}"?