There is an axiom coined I believe by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes novels that every programmer should keep in mind while debugging his program. <blockquote>When you have eliminated every other possibility; Whatever is left, however improbable, Must be the Solution.</blockquote> There has been many a time when I could have arrived at the answer much sooner but was stuck because what the program was doing seemed to be impossible. When I accepted that it was possible then I was able to begin tracking down how it was possible and thus finding the solution. After one too many occurences of this I think I'm going to make a big poster with this axiom on it and hang it above my monitor.
