Banana Problem

In a banana problem, it is difficult to tell where a program is supposed to stop. The phrase comes from a joke about the word banana, in which a child says: “I know how to spell banana, but I don’t know when to stop.” Likewise, in a conventional fencepost error, people or machines make mistakes on estimating where a boundary is. Programs with iterative loops can be vulnerable to fencepost errors, where a designer or developer miscounts and causes a code problem. The term “banana problem” can be used loosely to refer to a range of similar design problems.