Comment by zaphar
8 hours ago
I probably use a different interpretation of Postel's law. I try not "break" for anything I might receive, where break means "crash, silently corrupt data, so on". But that just means that I return an error to the sender usually. Is this what Postel meant? I have no idea.
I don't think that interpretation makes that much sense. Isn't it a bit too... obvious that you shouldn't just crash and/or corrupt data on invalid input? If the law were essentially "Don't crash or corrupt data on invalid input", it would seem to me that an even better law would be: "Don't crash or corrupt data." Surely there aren't too many situations where we'd want to avoid crashing because of bad input, but we'd be totally fine crashing or corrupting data for some other (expected) reason.
So, I think not crashing because of invalid input is probably too obvious to be a "law" bearing someone's name. IMO, it must be asserting that we should try our best to do what the user/client means so that they aren't frustrated by having to be perfect.
Yea, I interpret it as the same thing: On invalid input, don't crash or give the caller a root shell or whatever, but definitely don't swallow it silently. If the input is malformed, it should error and stop. NOT try to read the user's mind and conjure up some kind of "expected" output.
I think perhaps a better wording of the law would be: "Be prepared to be sent almost anything. But be specific about what you will send yourself".