gotcha

Gosperism | = G = | GPL

gotcha n.

A misfeature of a system, especially a programming language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it is both enticingly easy to invoke and completely unexpected and/or unreasonable in its outcome. For example, a classic gotcha in C is the fact that `if (a=b) {code;}` is syntactically valid and sometimes even correct. It puts the value of `b` into `a` and then executes `code` if `a` is non-zero. What the programmer probably meant was `if (a==b) {code;}`, which executes `code` if `a` and `b` are equal.

Gosperism | = G = | GPL