#define private public - "This software will crash Real Soon Now™. Promise!" (02 Sep 2009)

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---+++ [[DefinePrivatePublic20090902NostradamusCode]["This software will crash Real Soon Now&trade;. Promise!"]] (02 Sep 2009)

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<summary>
One of the more, uhm, _challenging_ customer suggestions I ever had to deal with was a bug report
which requested that <nop>CoCreate Modeling should somehow - in Nostradamus fashion-  sense that it 
was about to crash _at some point in the near future_.
</summary>

Yes, that's right; <nop>CoCreate Modeling was supposed to alert the user _before_ an actual crash 
was about to happen - by applying rocket-science dynamic program analysis and prediction 
techniques, sacrificing chicken and roasting them on Intel CPUs, or by having programmers dance 
naked around bonfires of compiler manuals. Whatever it would take.

No doubt that such a feature would be highly valuable. Imagine working on a model for 
several hours, and then you drive the application into a crash, and both the application 
and your model data disappear forever. If you could predict the crash, you'd save everybody
a whole lot of time and money. Oh, and with such code, you'd always win the lottery, too.
How convenient :D

Fortunately, <nop>CoCreate Modeling has always had pretty elaborate crash handling mechanisms. Whenever an unexpected exception occurs, a top-level crash handler catches it, pops up a message describing the 
problem, causes the current operation to be undone, restores the 3D model to a (hopefully) consistent
state, and returns the user to the interactive top-level loop so that s/he can save the 
model before restarting.

Over time, we taught our crash handler to deal with more and more critical situations. (Catching stack overflows and multithreading scenarios are particularly tricky.) Hence, users rarely lose data in 
<nop>CoCreate Modeling even if some piece of code crashes. Which pretty much obviates the need 
for the proposed clairvoyance module.

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