Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "7 Fancy Programming Words" video.

  1. Idempotency is particularly important for resource-disposal routines. The canonical† example is free(3) https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/free.3.html : when given a NULL pointer, it does nothing and returns no error. I go into more detail about why this sort of behaviour makes it easier to write robust code here https://github.com/ldo/a_structured_discipline_of_programming . †Did you include “canonical” in your list? Get your definition from here http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/canonical.html .
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