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Admin
Noooo .. no frist comments. How can I survive ?
Admin
by double quoting the frist post!
Admin
"Noooo .. no frist comments. How can I survive ?"
"Noooo .. no frist comments. How can I survive ?"
Yay! I live.
Admin
Been there, done that. I once dealt with an old geezer who typed the number 100 as IOO (Capital 'i', two capital 'o's).
Admin
Still, a software package which crashes when encountering the wrong type of quotes on input isn't a piece of software to be proud about. Throwing an error, or insulting the user, that's all fair game. But it should not crash.
Admin
I had the same issue once. The user had learned to type on a typewriter that had no "1" (one) key. To type a 1, you'd type lower-case L instead.
This caused the program to blow up every time she entered any numeric input.
She had literal decades of touch-typing muscle memory. This was not something you could just say "do it the correct way" to.
I fixed it by writing a numeric input function that would replace all "l" (ell) characters with "1" (one).
Admin
A lot of problems would be solved much sooner if the software logged the exact input string every time an input was rejected.
Admin
Way Back When I was in school and dirt had not yet been invented, each student got free computer time in their account on the mainframes, plus some more for certain courses. If you didn't want it, you couldn't give it to someone else... but you could tell someone your password. MC and I shared TZ's account (and yes we set his account "name" to Twilight Zone). MC changed it, and told TZ and me what the new one was. TZ never bothered trying to log in... but I did, and couldn't. MC said she had changed it to "umbrella" (this being back when using a dictionary word was reasonable)... but after closely watching her type it (violating the standard "turn your back as someone types their password" protocol), it was clearly "unbrella".
Admin
To Steve's credit, the narrative does say that he recognized the need for more elegant error handling. That which kills your user's computer only makes your program stronger.
Admin
The 1st microcomputer I got my hands on was a SWTPC 6800 in (probably) 1977 built by one of our Maths teachers for the school computing club and I'm pretty certain that the flavour of BASIC it used (Uiterwyk's?) allowed the use of letter I and letter O for one and zero. I do know it was an enormous advance on the pensioned off Monroe XI we'd been using up 'til then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWTPC_6800
Admin
Bell labs built unix and c for a particular set of serial terminals and microprocessors. Which is what it is. But if ASCII had been defined like my manual typewriter, where you typed an exclamation mark by back-spacing a single-quote over a full stop / period, c would have been a slightly different language.