One has to be very very careful while either
coding and being on
IRC or using a
console and being on
IRC, because terrible things can happen.
Examples
ex. 1: You are chatting away in #133tH@x0r and for some reason, you decide you need to su to root. But, alas, you are not as leet as you thought you were. You type
su
1@ml33t
... INTO YOUR IRC WINDOW!
ex. 2: You are coding hard on that last minute project with only 4 hours before the deadline and you haven't run your program to test it in the last 6 hours because you've been coding like a madman. In the mean time, you've been hanging on #perl in case you have any questions that aren't in the book (hey, any excuse will do).
You say, ok, time to run this sucker. You are feeling pretty confident that it will run on the first try. you :w. You switch to your xterm and
#> perl ./foo
... and get humongous sick pile of errors. 3 1/2 hours of searching later, you find a the culprit: A stray :) in the middle of your 7 dimensional array implementation.