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[TiagoTiago]

A bigger snake should have bigger brains, specially if it's a mythological/magical monster and not just the result of an increase in the oxygen percentage of the atmosphere; since we got skeletal elephants, fairies, dragons etc, i think it's more likely it would have enough intellect to not jam itself where it won't fit and instead try to navigate it's way out safely.

But if it really would be such a huge difficulty to code the backward motion, i would have to accept the snake choosing the weird bend from the start if the alternative is not having it at all.


Btw, how was your g/f's snake rescued from that pipe? Was it ok afterwards? No sore spots, no dislocated  vertebrae, still feeling the tip of it's tail etc?

[Aquillion]

i can only begin to imagine the tangled mess that the underlying code must be (i've read there was a crash caused by vermin getting caught by a cobweb!)

That's actually an easy crash to understand, because I've seen things like that in my code.  When you're working with a big project, it's impossible to remember every little thing you did or predict how they will all interact...

In this case, I'd assume that when vermin were written, it was assumed that they would only die in certain ways, and, in particular, wouldn't die at a certain point in their move code -- they call a move function, probably, then do other stuff (or other stuff is done referencing them) under the assumption that they still exist after that movement.

Years later, when Toady coded webs capable of killing vermin, he didn't remember that he'd coded vermin movement code under those assumptions, and, as a result, they got killed during a function call that the vermin-code assumed would never kill them.  The later code that attempted to access the vermin's data therefore caused a null pointer exception when it referenced the vermin that no longer existed.

At least that would be my assumption.  It's a fairly common sort of mistake.