Furthermore the phrase ...in general indicates a confused mind... does not say that Fastolfe in particular has a confused mind. It just says that this kind of mistake is symptomatic of a confused mind.

Yes, I mean it that way. In code review, you don't usually get the luxury of reading each line of code. You rely on patterns of behavior. I treat some combinations of things as "speed bumps" that are not only questionable behavior in and of themselves, but also say "slow down, there's likely to be other confusion near here as well". And the result of this slowing down often pays off in finding other bugs.

Code review and QA is an art, not a science. After years of reading other people's code, I do a lot of things automatically, and I'm attempting to describe my behavior here, so if it doesn't always come across clean, bear with me. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker