[ahazred8ta]

Apparently it started out in aviation engineering, referring to unusual behavior at the edge of the flight envelope. Related to 'corner case'.

[hairywalt]

That would make sense, and was something I'd heard but I'm struggling to find an actual example of usage?

[greenyoda]

Here's a reference I found to "edge case" and "corner case" with respect to a flight envelope: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/An-example-flight-envelo...

(I found this by searching for the terms "edge case" and "flight envelope" together.)

Also, the Wikipedia "corner case" article talks about how this terminology relates to the flight envelope metaphor:

> The term "corner case" comes about by physical analogy with "edge case" as an extension of the "flight envelope" metaphor to a set of testing conditions whose boundaries are determined by the 2^n combinations of extreme (minimum and maximum) values for the number n of variables being tested, i.e., the total parameter space for those variables. Where an edge case involves pushing one variable to a minimum or maximum, putting users at the "edge" of the configuration space, a corner case involves doing so with multiple variables, which would put users at a "corner" of a multidimensional configuration space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_case

[hairywalt]

Cheers for these, appreciate everybody taking a look.

You've given good examples of what I am finding myself... your Researchgate link is indeed aeronautical, but is also a software machine learning related paper from 2023. So unfortunately doesn't prove this doesn't come from the modern software usage rather than the other direction.

And when I read the second Wikipedia entry previously I'd hoped to see an attribution... So could very well be correct, just there is no reference to look up.