Quote about how many percentage of good code is error handling?

Question

In one of the earliest podcasts I remember Jeff Attwood in the StackOverflow Podcast mentioning a quote about how x % (where x was something like 70 or more) of all good code was error handling.

Does anyone know the exact quote? I can't seem to find it any more...

Answer 1

It extremely depends on the type of project, programming language and your style.

For instance, in C++ you could have maybe 20% of code doing memory management, in Java that would be 0.

Working with WinAPI would result in 5-10% of your code wasted for analysis of return values. With VisualBasic or C# that would be 0.