> but a bug will live on.
Sometimes, yes. But it has also happened often to me that an old bug I was trying to fix was simply gone, either because the error mode has gone away, or the feature that the bug related to has been removed.
> But it has also happened often to me that an old bug I was trying to fix was simply gone, either because the error mode has gone away, or the feature that the bug related to has been removed.
And this is why groups like the OpenBSD team and the Linux kernel team are so eager to remove support for old hardware. Removing support for the 80386 cleaned up code which no longer had to have special cases to handle opcodes and features the 80386 doesn't have but later x86 processors do.
It will be the "junk DNA" of the source code -- because of workarounds and baked in assumptions it will be impossible to eradicate.
In a thousand years time will archeologists study us through the bugs left behind in Linux 1300.05 and windows (30)95? Do you think there will still be jobs for Cobol programmers?