On Tuesday, 26 February 2013 at 15:26:50 UTC, Steven
Schveighoffer wrote:
You mean changing as in, instead of throwing an exception, it
tries to use a null value and segfaults? Not a very
significant difference.
I'm still not following... where would the segfault come from?
Unless you dereference .ptr, you can't get a segfault from
operating on a null string.
But we are splitting hairs here. The first one could
potentially change the environment variable that the second
uses, thereby affecting the behavior.
That's a completely different matter from changing how code
within the same program accesses the environment in general. Both
components may be operating on specialized, prefix-named
variables that have no chance of interfering with each other, and
still break when the behavior of a global object changes.
It would be safer for the component to define a very small
wrapper, which changes environment's semantics according to its
requirements.
