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> Because they hit "unknown error" and when that happens on safety critical systems you have to assume that all your system's invariants are compromised and you're in undefined behavior -- so all you can do is stop.

What surprised me more is that the amount of data existing for all waypoints on the globe is quite small, if I were to implement a feature that query by their names as an identifier the first thing I'd do is to check for duplicates in the dataset. Because if there are, I need to consider that condition in every place where I'd be querying a waypoint by a potential duplicate identifier.

I had that thought immediately when looking at flight plan format, noticed the short strings referring to waypoints, way before getting to the section where they point out the name collision issue.

Maybe I'm too used to work with absurd amounts of data (at least in comparison to this dataset), it's a constant part of my job to do some cursory data analysis to understand the parameters of the data I'm working with, what values can be duplicated or malformed, etc.




If there are duplicate waypoint IDs, they are not close together. They can be easily eliminated by selecting the one that is one hop away from the prior waypoint. Just traversing the graph of waypoints in order would filter out any unreachable duplicates.




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