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Comment by cbsmith | Hacker News Reader

Here's the thing though... Those mistakes you made aren't language specific. What languages don't expose you to making similar mistakes?

There are some, but they aren't the ones people usually think of when they say, "I'd always use X instead of Java".

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It mostly is language specific though isn't it? Take python: IOError is a global, one main way to print, you don't have to worry about the output buffer.

Oh no. Python has lots of ways to print. You can actually pretty easily hose that part up in Python, and Python doesn't require the flush because it automatically closes/flushes the stream. In general (as in, if you didn't know you were using sys.in and sys.out) in Python you'd want to use a "with" statement to ensure that really happens.

So, for example, if you are in Python3, sys.in and sys.out are by default in text mode, which is not going to end well for anyone.

Well, if I were making the test framework for this test, I'd only send ASCII text to the programs.

It's a trivial test, so I'll give you trivial input and not have you worry about "what if someone gives me random bytes".

The test isn't to demonstrate you know off the top of your head how to deal with an edge case. But if it were and I were allowed to pick my language, I'd pick bash and just write

cat

> The test isn't to demonstrate you know off the top of your head how to deal with an edge case.

The only edge case is knowing you need to flush the output, which is relevant whether you send ASCII text or not. The other edge cases around ASCII are just whether you use the correct API's or not.

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