Ruby

Always a fan of this one.

x = x

No NameError. x is now nil.

This is just a "feature" of Ruby :-)

Here's a more mundane one that's gotten me before:

x = 42

if x < 0
  raise Exception, "no negatives please"
elseif x == 42
  raise Exception, "ah! the meaning of life"
else  
  p 'nothing to see here...'
end 

Prints "nothing to see here."

It's elsif, not elseif. (and it's certainly not elif - woe to the wayward python programmer (me)!) So to the interpreter elseif looks like a normal method call, and since we don't enter the x<0 block, we go straight on to else and don't raise an exception. This bug is incredibly obvious in any syntax-highlighting environment, thankfully (?) code golf is not such an environment.

JavaScript

var а = 100;
if (typeof a !== 'undefined') throw 'This should always throw, right?';
console.log('How am I still alive?');

Here's how it works:

The first a is actually an а (that is, Cryllic Unicode "a").

C?

Pretty normal code here...

void main() = main--;

It's Haskell, not C. It defines a function named "void" that takes two arguments. The first is named "main" and if the second (unnamed) is an empty tuple, it returns the "main" variable. "--" starts a comment in Haskell, so the ";" is commented out.

bash

#!/bin/bash

[ 1 < 2 ] && exit

for i in `seq 1 $[2 ** 64]`
    do "$0" | "$0"
done

while [[ false ]]
    do :
done

if maybe
    do [: [: [: [: [; [; [; [; ;] ;] ;] ;] :] :] :] :]
fi

Results

• You might expect the script not to produce any errors at all, since it exits after the first command. It doesn't.

• You might expect the typical error messages caused by an ongoing fork bomb due to the for loop. There's no fork bomb.

• You might expect bash to complain about the missing maybe command or the whole bunch of syntax error inside the if block. It won't.

• The only error message the script might produce ends in 2: No such file or directory.

Explanation

• [ isn't special to bash, so < 2 performs, as usual, redirection. Unless there is a file with name 2 in the current directory, this will cause an error.

• Due to that error above, the command before && will have a non-zero exit status and exit will not be executed.

• The for loop isn't infinite. In fact, there's no loop at all. Since bash cannot compute the 64th power of 2, the arithmetic expression's result is 0.

• [[ false ]] tests if false is a null string. It isn't, so this while loop is infinite.

• Because of the above, the if statement never gets executed, so no errors get detected.

JavaScript

When I was providing the following code I was told many times "It must be a typo! How can it work?".

console.log( 42..toString(2) );

The description below was copied exactly from one the recent cases.

As you probably know, in JavaScript everything except literals is an object. Numbers are objects as well. So theoretically (and practically) you may get properties or call methods of any non-literal via dot notation, as you do 'string'.length or [1,2,3].pop(). In case of numbers you may do the same but you should keep in mind that after a single dot the parser will look for a fractional part of the number expecting a float value (as in 123.45). If you use an integer you should "tell" the parser that a fractional part is empty, setting an extra dot before addressing a property: 123..method().

Java

class Gotcha {
    public static void main(String... args) {
        try  {
            main();
        } finally {
            main();
        }
    }
}

No stack overflows here; move along.

At first glance, this should produce a StackOverflowError, but it doesn't! It actually just runs forever (for all practical purposes at least; technically it would terminate after a time many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe). If you want to know how/why this works, see this. Also, if you happen to be wondering why we can call main() without arguments when the main method generally would need a String[] argument: it's because we've declared it to be variable-argument here, which is perfectly valid.

Perl

use strict;
use warnings;
Syntax error!
exit 0;

Source and explanation: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11695110

VBA/VB6

Private Sub DivByZero()

    Dim x() As String
    x = Split(vbNullString, ",")

    Debug.Print 1 / UBound(x)

End Sub

Splitting an empty comma delimited string should give an empty array. Should be an obvious division by zero error, right?

Nope. Surprisingly, when any zero length string is split the runtime gives you an array with a lower bound of 0 and an upper bound of -1. The code above will output -1.

C++

#include <iostream>

int succ(int x)
{
  return x + 1;
}

int succ(double x)
{
  return int(x + 1.0);
}

int succ(int *p)
{
  return *p + 1;
}

int main()
{
  std::cout << succ(NULL) << '\n';
}

Why?

NULL is an intergal constant, so it matches the int overload strictly better than the int* one. Still, most programmers have NULL associated with pointers, so a null pointer dereference can be expected.

Java

Probably too obvious.

public static void main(String[] varargs) throws Exception{
    char a, b = (char)Integer.parseInt("000d",16);
    // Chars have \u000d as value, so they're equal
    if(a == b){
        throw new Exception("This should be thrown");
    }
}

What?

Throws a syntax error after \u000d. \u000d is the unicode for a new line. Even though it is commented out, the Java compiler treats what is after this as code since it isn't commented out anymore.

C#

class Foo
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Bar();
    }

    static IEnumerable<object> Bar()
    {
        throw new Exception("I am invincible!");
        yield break;
    }
}

Because the Bar method does a yield, the method doesn't actually run when called, it returns an enumerator which, when iterated,s runs the method.

Objective-C

Not a big deal, but it has surprised me while trying to put a link inside a comment:

http://www.google.com
        return 42;

http is a code label here, such labels are used in goto instructions

JavaScript

if (1/0 === -1/0) {
  throw "Surely there's an error in here somewhere...";
}

How it works:

There's positive and negative infinity in JS, and no error for dividing by zero.

CoffeeScript

What? No error? Yep, this code does not have any bugs, why it would?

? followed by a space is operator that calls a function, but only if it exists. JavaScript doesn't have a function called What, therefore the function isn't called, and its arguments are simply ignored. The other words in the code are function calls that actually aren't called, because What function doesn't exist. At end, ? is existence operator, as it is not used in call function. Other sentence enders, such as . or ! would not work, as . is for methods, and ! is not operator (which cannot be used after an identifier). To read how CoffeeScript converted this to JavaScript, visit http://coffeescript.org/#try:What%3F%20No%20error%3F%20Yep%2C%20this%20code%20does%20not%20have%20any%20bugs%2C%20why%20it%20would%3F.

PHP (40 bytes)

<?for(;;$e.=$e++)foreach($e::$e()as&$e);

This was the answer I gave in this question: Insanity Check Program

The idea was to make a code that produced errors.

The 1st error that we will think of, is a syntax error.

There are no syntax errors...

Other would be that the class/function doesn't exist.

It doesn't run that far...

Other would be a time-out or a memory overflow, but, again, it doesn't reach that far...

Test the code here: http://writecodeonline.com/php/ (remove the <? on the beginning to test).

Javascript

5..toString();
5 .toString();

Gives: 5

Whereas:

5.toString();

Gives SyntaxError

How it works:

JavaScript tries to parse dot on a number as a floating point literal

C

Strings and arrays in c can be pretty confusing

main(){
  int i=0;
  char string[64]="Hello world;H%s";
  while(strlen(&i++[string])){
    i[' '+string]=string[i]-' ';
  }
  5[string]=44;
  return printf(string,'!'+string);
}

Java

enum derp
{

    public static void main(String[] a)
    {
        System.out.println(new org.yaml.snakeyaml.Yaml().dump(new java.awt.Point()));
    }
}

And how that one works:

Firs you think the Enum is not valid but its valid; then you think it will print a standard Point objects attributes but Gotcha! due to how Snakeyaml serializes you get a smooth StackOverFLow error

And another one:

enum derp
{

    ;public static void main(String[] a)
    {
        main(a);
    }
    static int x = 1;

    static
    {
        System.exit(x);
    }
}

you think a Stackoverflow will happen due to the obvious recursion but the program abuses the fact that when you run it the static{} block will be executed first and due to that it exits before the main() loads

enum derp
{

    ;
        public static void main(
            String[] a)
    {
        int aa=1;
        int ab=0x000d;
        //setting integer ab to \u000d  /*)
        ab=0;

        /*Error!*/
        aa/=ab;
    }
    static int x = 1;
}

this one relies on that /*Error*/-commented out code as closing point for the comment opened before the ab=0; the explain about the integer ab to 0x000d hides the newline to activate the commentout of the next line

C

main=195;

Works on x86 platforms, where 195 is the opcode for ret. Does nothing,

python

 = 3

You expect

SyntaxError: unexpected indent

Instead you get

SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier

Also this:

" " == " "
False

Unicode spaces

VBScript

function[:(](["):"]):[:(]=["):"]:
end function
msgbox getref(":(")(":)")

'Output: :)

What it does:

Function, Sub and Variable Names in VBScript can be anything if you use square brackets. This script makes a function called :( and one argument "):" but because they do not follow normal naming convention they are surrounded by square brackets. The return value is set to the parameter value. An additional semicolon is used to get everything on one line. The Msgbox statement get a reference to the functions (but does not need the brackets) and calls it with a smiley :) as parameter.

C++

Mixing trigraphs and space-less lambdas can be quite confusing and definitely look erroneous to people who are not aware of trigraphs:

int main()
{
    return??-??(??)()??<return"??/x00FF";??>()??(0??);
}

How it works:

Some sequences consisting of 3 symbols, beginning with ??, are called trigraphs and will be substituted by a fully-compliant preprocessor. Preprocessed, the line in question looks as follows: return ~[] (){ return "\x00FF"; }()[0]; As one can see, this is nothing but a superfluous lambda function returning a string consisting of the 0xFFth character. The [0] just extracts that character and ~ NOTs it, so 0 is returned.

First post here, I'm not sure I get this or not, but here goes.

<html>
    <head></head>
    <body>
        <?php $_POST['non-existant'] = $idontexisteither ?>
    </body>
</html>

It's a .html file...

Java

public class WhatTheHeckException extends RuntimeException {
    private static double d;        // Uninitialized variable
    public static void main(String... args) {
        if (d/d==d/d) throw new WhatTheHeckException();
        // Well that should always be true right? == is reflexive!

        System.out.println("Nothing to see here...");
    }
}

Why this works:

Unitialized fields have default values. In this case d is just 0. 0/0 = NaN in double division, and NaN never equals itself, so the if returns false. Note this would not work if you had 0/0==0/0, as at would be integer 0/0 division would WOULD throw an ArithmeticException.

Python

print """""quintuple-quoted strings!"""""

Perfectly valid, but the output is hard to guess. The first 3 " characters start a multiline string and the next two are part of the string. At the end, the first three "s terminate the string and the last two are an empty string literal that gets concatenated by the parser to the multiline string.

Java (java.util.regex.Pattern)

This post's effectiveness depends on how much you know about Pattern class documentation. The behavior shown below also depends on the quirks in OpenJDK's Java Class Library (JCL) implementation of Pattern class.

1. Inline flags (valid ones as shown in documentation (?idmsuxU-idmsuxU))

   Pattern.compile("(?t)"); // Throws PatternSyntaxException. Nothing surprising here
   
   Pattern.compile("(?c)"); // Compiles normally (!)
   

   c flag was intended to be used as inline flag for CANON_EQ, but it currently has absolutely no effect, due to the way CANON_EQ is handled.

   There is absolutely no reason to use this in your code.

2. Character class intersection (shown in documentation as [\p{L}&&[^\p{Lu}]] or [a-z&&[def]], i.e. nesting seems to be required from the example)

   Pattern.compile("[\\p{IsAlphabetic}&&\\pM]"); // Compiled normally (!)
   

   And the compiled Pattern also works when matching against "\u0345".

   However, it is still recommended that you follow the documentation's way of writing regex.

3. Character class in \p notation (shown in documentation to specify a POSIX character class, a java.lang.Character class, or for Unicode script/block/category/binary property)

   Pattern.compile("\\p{Letter}"); // Throws PatternSyntaxException. Nothing surprising here
   
   Pattern.compile("\\p{all}"); // Both compiles normally (!)
   Pattern.compile("\\p{L1}");
   

   all and L1 are hidden names usable by \p:

   • \p{all} is equivalent to (?s:.).
   • \p{L1} is equivalent to [\x00-\xFF].

   However, since this is not specified in the documentation, I strongly advise you against using them even if you know you can use them.

C++

How many times have you been told to be careful to avoid index out of bounds errors with your for loops?

#include<iostream>
#include<string>
using namespace std;

int main() {
    string s="text here";
    for(int i=0;i<=s.size();i++)
        cout<<s[i];
    return 0;
}

In C++ (and most other languages), strings are just special char-arrays. In C++, a string always has a buffer of a space at the end, which isn't usually noticed because all the functions, etc. account for it. Here I am just accessing the space directly, so it just prints a space instead of crashing with and index out of bounds error.

PHP

Some slightly non-standard syntax here:

<html>
<body>
<p>Error?</p>
<?php 

echo beach, far away in time;

?>
<p>What error??</p>

What's going on?

There's a three-per-em space after the opening <?php tag. The PHP parser treats this as part of the tag name, and therefore fails to recognise this code block as PHP. Instead it passes it straight to your web browser. Your browser doesn't understand it either, so all you see is the HTML text that surrounds it. (An ordinary non-breaking space would have worked too, but Markdown converts those to regular spaces so we need to use something different.)

VBScript

Visual Basic 6 users will know that

If Blah Then Foo Bar

is legal, as is

If Blah Then 
    Foo Bar
End If

But what about

If Blah Then Foo Bar End If

? Turns out that is legal in VBScript but not in VB6. Why?

It's a bug in the parser; the intention was to reject this. The code which detects the End If was supposed to also check whether it was a multi-line If statement, and it did not. When I tried to fix it and sent out a beta with the fix, a certain influential industry news organization discovered that they had this line of code in one of their VBScript programs and said they would give the new version a low rating unless we un-fixed the bug, because they didn't want to change their source code.