A critical bug in a computer program, resulting from a minor and understandable but still really bad mistake, that can take hours to figure out and fix. Named for Gary
Gillespie, a
Computer Science professor at
UC San Diego, since he is prone to making small mistakes in his lectures that can drastically change their meaning.
Our professor told us to use sizeof(
char)' instead of the number eight to make our code more readable, and it broke my program. Well it turns out sizeof
returns the size in
bytes, not bits, and all my code broke. What a Gary...