That exact version will end up making "true" false any time it appears on a line number that is divisible by 10.
During the compilation, "true" would be replaced by that statement and within the statement, "__LINE__" would be replaced by the line number of the current line. So at runtime, you end up witb the line number modulo 10 (%10). In C, something is true if its value is not 0. So for e.g., lines 4, 17, 116, 39, it ends up being true. For line numbers that can be divided by 10, the result is zero, and thus false.
In reality the compiler would optimise that modulo operation away and pre-calculate the result during compilation.
The original version constantly behaves differently at runtime, this version would always give the same result... Unless you change any line and recompile.
The original version is also super likely to be actually true. This version would be false very often. You could reduce the likelihood by increasing the 10, but you can't make it too high or it will never be triggered.
One downside compared to the original version is that the value of "true" can be 10 different things (anything between 0 and 9), so you would get a lot more weird behaviour since "1 == true" would not always be true.
__ LINE __ is a preprocessor macro. It will be replaced with the line number it is written on when the code is compiled. Macros aren't processed when debugging. So the code will be skipped during debug but appear in the compiled program, meaning the program will work fine during debug but occasionally not work after compile.
"__ LINE __ % 10" returns 0 if the line number is divisible by 10 and non-zero if not. 0 is considered false and non-zero is considered true.
#define is also macro. In this case, it will replace all instances of "true" with something that will only sometimes evaluate to true when the program is compiled.
rand() will be infrequent < 10 (at least ten in 2^15 times, if not exponentially more), so automated tests are likely to pass. If they don't, they're likely to pass on the second try, and then everyone shrugs and continues. If it's buried in 500 other lines, then it's likely the code reviewer will give it all a quick scan and say "it's fine". It's the three line diffs that get lots of scrutiny.
In other words, you seem to have a lot more faith in the process than I do.
A lot of you have a lot of faith in people reviewing PRs. I know a few Sr. developers, that if shit was too busy, would skim it and say 'fuck it, it will be QAs problem.
If you put this in the correct sub-system in file that would only be executed once a month, for example a maintenance class, It would be really hard to notice something is wrong if it didn't cause issues seen immediately.
Maybe this is the story of an intern that added something that also fucked up boolean comparisons in a subsystem used once a month. Where there is a 2 week lag between the execution and operations noticing something wrong.
This looks like a C macro. Basically what it does is replaces the word "true" in the code with (rand() > 10). The rand() function will return a random number from 0 to 32767. So (rand() > 10) will very likely return "true" but not always.
So say you have some code like this:
if (someVar == true) {
// Do stuff
}
It would replace "true" with code that usually evaluates to "true" but not always. So every so often your code would just do the wrong thing but it would be hard to debug because it would be rare.
Granted, in that example you probably would just write "if (someVar)" making this moot, but there are more realistic cases where you'd use the constant "true"
rand() generates a number from 0 to a constant defined in stdlib, which usually corresponds to the architechture of your compiler. So, for 32 bit systems (assuming all the software in the line is 32 bit, too) it will be 2^31-1 = 2 147 483 647, as 1 bit in integers is reserved for negative numbers and 1 number is 0.
Though, by design it is guaranteed to be at least 32767, which is a value for 16 bit integers.
The C standard library function int rand(void) returns a pseudo random integer between 0 and RAND_MAX (which should be at least 2^15, depending on the actual implementation).
Depending on the distribution of the pseudo random numbers, it will be true for over > 99% of its applications.
I hope I learn some day how to code a bug in python that will not show up in any error messages and absolutely ruins a program. I'd love to find a random program at whatever job I end up at and before quitting just ruin it with a random line of code that doesn't output an error code.
What the hell? Thats not funny or anything it just fucks with your ex-coworkers who probably werent the problem, management isnt affected by that.
Pro tip, you seem really arrogant (including some other comments) and you need to tone that down before you enter the industry. Its nothing to be ashamed of and I'm not trying to insult you, you just assume your experiences are way more universally valid than they are.
Logical errors are an entire domain of programmer troubleshooting. All you'll have to do is attempt to learn programming, and you WILL write something that throws no errors, performs terribly, and confuses you for hours.
We all do. It's almost a badge of honor to push past a few of them.
Hell, sometimes it happens when no one has made an error but a particular mix of data or odd arrangement of hardware it ends up running on hits an undiscovered edge case that buggers things up.
It's not hard to do. What would be hard would be getting it through code review. Like the example provided.. how would that ever get through code review for a merge? Must not be a well-protected code base?
Publish your own package to PyPI that on import does some evil stuff. Name the package something similar to a known, but not too well known package. Supply chain attacks are even less defended against than other stuff.
All this relies on companies being shit though, but well, we all know that's the case in a lot of places.