Immortalized in the Commit Logs

My name is now logged forever in the commit comments of a pretty Awesome Project!

Have a look at the commit log for yourself (look for my name next to "NPE").

Here's how it happened: One quiet evening in June I was looking at some code diffs of that Awesome Project (don't ask why) and saw something that didn't look quite right. Keep in mind all I was viewing was the diff so I didn't see the full context of the code. Here's the snippet I noticed:

if (varTable == null) {
    if (DEBUG) System.out.println("resizing from " + varTable.length + " to " +  getMetaClass(). getRealClass(). getVariableTableSizeWithObjectId());
    // lots more code...
}

Do you see the NullPointerException? The code just checked if varTable was null, then proceeds to dereference it. That just can't be right. I double-checked it and then finally looked at the whole file. Then I saw it, the DEBUG flag is set to false way up at the top of the file. That's why the lurking NPE never causes a problem. So what's your opinion? Is it a real bug? The code will never get executed so it's not really a problem. Is a NullPointerException still a bug if it's located in a block of unreachable code?

In any case, I thought I should at least alert @Headius, the guy who wrote it. The fix went in the next commit and he put my name in the comments! If I ever see @Headius speak at a conference I'll see if he'll autograph the commit log.