Programmers and undefined behavior

ISAGN for a sadistic C/C++ compiler to school the current generation of programmers in the dangers of relying on undefined behavior. Too many of them do things like assume that dereferencing a null pointer should cause a crash and core dump. The problem is that nothing says that. The C++ standard leaves the behavior in that case undefined, which means the code and possibly the compiler is free to do anything it wants to at that point. It doesn't even have to consistently do the same thing every time.

So, a sadistic compiler. At run time it'd check for various sorts of undefined behavior. When it detected them, eg. an attempt to use the result of dereferencing a null pointer (as by calling a method through a null object pointer), it'd branch to a routine that'd randomly select from a list of dangerous things to do, such as spewing the contents of /dev/random onto the console, kill -9ing a random process on the system, or zeroing all blocks on a random attached storage device. In addition, the compiler would check for any undefined behavior it could feasibly check for, and take similar actions when asked to compiler such code. Thus, trying to compile "x = a++ - a++;" might result in your system disk being wiped.

The goal: to impress upon programmers that you cannot rely on undefined behavior. At all. Not on what it does, not even that it does the same thing all the time. The only guarantee you have is that you won't like what'll happen. So avoid it like the plague, or pay the price.