Re^2: The worst excuse I have ever heard is:

It's a Lunar Phase Dependency.

One debugger I used actually had an option to display the phase of the moon :). And actually that debugger (which was otherwise quite good) had a bug that made the execution misbehave when stepping over some instructions under specific conditions. As you might guess, I was using the debugger trying to find a bug, so I ended up with what I thought was a single bug that was behaving differently depending on how close I was trying to observe it. Lunar Phase Dependency alright.

Comment on Re^2: The worst excuse I have ever heard is:

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Re^3: The worst excuse I have ever heard is: by hippo (Archbishop) on Jan 10, 2020 at 15:22 UTC
what I thought was a single bug that was behaving differently depending on how close I was trying to observe it This is known as a Heisenbug.	[reply]
Re^4: The worst excuse I have ever heard is: by Eily (Monsignor) on Jan 10, 2020 at 16:09 UTC
That article says "Frustrated programmers may humorously blame a heisenbug on the phase of the moon" which goes back to the original bad excuse :P. The additional bug (the debugger bug, not the original one I was trying to analyze) was also an Heisenbug on its own because it would disappear when the instruction was moved (the compiler would add some padding in the data for every other position of the instruction). So as soon as I realized that I was dealing with two bugs instead of just one, and added a print statement to follow what was happening, the second bug disappeared :P	[reply]