Pointer fault
Spike TV has been showing 2 episodes of Star Trek: DS9 every day at noon and 1pm EST, and so being the Trek fanatics that we are, we've been recording them during the day and watching them in the evenings.
In one of the episodes we watched last night, the casino in which Vic's holographic night club is located was bought by rival hologram Franky “Eyes”. The DS9 crew is baffled by this as it seems that no one wrote the holodeck program for Franky and his takeover of the casino. Miles offers the possible explanation that it's a “pointer fault” causing some errant program to begin wreaking havoc on Vic's club.
So, if you thought that the evolution of high-level or visual programming languages, smarter virtual machines with super-intelligent behind-the-scenes memory management and garbage collection will soon do away with pointer mistakes, you're clearly wrong. Since Star Trek is real and all, we'll have warp drive long before we solve errant pointer problems.
Either that, or the holodeck is a legacy system from the 20th century written in C.
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