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gotcha


gotcha: n.
   A misfeature of a system, especially a programming
   language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes
   because it both enticingly easy to invoke and completely unexpected
   and/or unreasonable in its outcome.  For example, a classic gotcha
   in C is the fact that `if (a=b) code;' is
   syntactically valid and sometimes even correct.  It puts the value
   of `b' into `a' and then executes `code' if
   `a' is non-zero.  What the programmer probably meant was
   `if (a==b) code;', which executes `code' if
   `a' and `b' are equal.