在fortran中(当然是77，可能在95中也是如此)，未声明的变量和以I到N开头的参数(“In”组)将是INTEGER，所有其他未声明的变量和参数将是REAL(源)。这与“在某些情况下可选的空白”相结合，导致了最著名的错误之一。

正如弗雷德·韦伯在1990年的《另类民间传说:计算机》一书中所说:

I worked at Nasa during the summer of 1963. The group I was working in was doing preliminary work on the Mission Control Center computer systems and programs. My office mate had the job of testing out an orbit computation program which had been used during the Mercury flights. Running some test data with known answers through it, he was getting answers that were close, but not accurate enough. So, he started looking for numerical problems in the algorithm, checking to make sure his tests data was really correct, etc. After a couple of weeks with no results, he came across a DO statement, in the form: DO 10 I=1.10 This statement was interpreted by the compiler (correctly) as: DO10I = 1.10 The programmer had clearly intended: DO 10 I = 1, 10 After changing the . to a , the program results were correct to the desired accuracy. Apparently, the program's answers had been "good enough" for the sub-orbital Mercury flights, so no one suspected a bug until they tried to get greater accuracy, in anticipation of later orbital and moon flights. As far as I know, this particular bug was never blamed for any actual failure of a space flight, but the other details here seem close enough that I'm sure this incident is the source of the DO story.

我认为这是一个很大的WTF，如果DO10I被作为DO10I，并且反过来，因为隐式声明被认为是类型REAL。这是个很棒的故事。

在JavaScript中，下面的构造

return
{
    id : 1234,
    title : 'Tony the Pony'
};

返回undefined是一个语法错误，因为在返回后的换行上偷偷地插入了分号。以下工作正如你所期望的那样:

return {
    id : 1234,
    title : 'Tony the Pony'
};

更糟糕的是，这个也可以(至少在Chrome中):

return /*
*/{
    id : 1234,
    title : 'Tony the Pony'
};

下面是同一个问题的一个变种，它不会产生语法错误，只是无声地失败了:

return
    2 + 2;

C / C + +:

快速平方根逆算法利用了IEEE浮点表示法(代码复制自维基百科):

float InvSqrt(float x)
{
    union {
        float f;
        int i;
    } tmp;
    tmp.f = x;
    tmp.i = 0x5f3759df - (tmp.i >> 1);
    float y = tmp.f;
    return y * (1.5f - 0.5f * x * y * y);
}

Modula-2没有elseif或elseif;它有elsif

X = X + 1

当我还是初学者的时候，这很难消化，而现在函数式语言不使用它了，这就更难了!

如果你不明白这有多奇怪:把等号看作断言语句，而不是赋值操作，就像你在基础代数中经常做的那样，那么这相当于说“0 = 1”。

这缺少了一个奇怪的特性:Python没有switch语句(尽管存在变通方法)。