[feral]

I've been trying to figure out what he was getting at, as well. The original article, by Elliotte, seems to have updated the code snippet to:

' String s = ""; for (int i = 0; i < args.length; i++) { s += args[i]; } '

I deduce from this that the error was in the copy/paste. The line that was supposed to be changed to 's+= args[i]' was accidentally left as 's+= array[i]'

As such, its a simple failure to replace all instances of 'array' in the pasted code, rather than anything to do with 'operator overloading', or even to do with checking if 'array[i]' was out of bounds - there is simply no variable 'array' supposed to be in that context.

I wish Turoff had been less obtuse about it, especially as the original Elliotte post seems to have been silently updated.

[Stormbringer]

In the interest of being fair, it is (by internet standards) quite an old blog post, which was probably a bit of a toss off effort in the first place.

If 'the bug' is just a copy/paste problem of a variable that doesn't exist in that scope, then compilation will fail at that point, so again, I don't see how that could be the one that Turoff said would survive for weeks in the wild.

[kscaldef]

But, if the bug is a copy/paste of a variable that does exist in that scope, he's exactly correct that it could survive for weeks and be very difficult to actually track down (because of the sort of blindness to details that happens when you read "idioms" like this by visual pattern matching rather than actually reading the code).