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Update example in README #19

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23 changes: 13 additions & 10 deletions README.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -7,22 +7,25 @@ Duration Check

A Go linter to detect cases where two `time.Duration` values are being multiplied in possibly erroneous ways.

For example, consider the following (highly contrived) function:
Consider the following (highly contrived) code:

```go
func waitFor(someDuration time.Duration) {
timeToWait := someDuration * time.Second
time.Sleep(timeToWait)
func waitForSeconds(someDuration time.Duration) {
timeToWait := someDuration * time.Second
fmt.Printf("Waiting for %s\n", timeToWait)
}

func main() {
waitForSeconds(5) // waits for 5 seconds
waitForSeconds(5 * time.Second) // waits for 1388888h 53m 20s
}
```

Although the above code would compile without any errors, its runtime behaviour would almost certainly be incorrect.
A caller would reasonably expect `waitFor(5 * time.Seconds)` to wait for ~5 seconds but they would actually end up
waiting for ~1,388,889 hours.
Both invocations of the function are syntactically correct but the second one is probably not what most people want.
In this contrived example it is quite easy to spot the mistake. However, if the incorrect `waitForSeconds` invocation is
nested deep within a complex piece of code that runs in the background, the mistake could go unnoticed for months (which
is exactly what happened in a production backend system of fairly well-known software service).

The above example is just for illustration purposes only. The problem is glaringly obvious in such a simple function
and even the greenest Gopher would discover the issue immediately. However, imagine a much more complicated function
with many more lines and it is not inconceivable that such logic errors could go unnoticed.

See the [test cases](testdata/src/a/a.go) for more examples of the types of errors detected by the linter.

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