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From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,rec.humor.d,rec.humor
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Message-ID: <36279@think.UUCP>
Date: 9 Feb 89 17:30:58 GMT
References: <7143@pyr.gatech.EDU> <532@geovision.UUCP> <768@ur-cc.UUCP> <1012@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM> <380@frksyv.UUCP> <7754@netnews.upenn.edu> <7129@pucc.Princeton.EDU>
Sender: news@think.UUCP
Reply-To: barmar@kulla.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 19

In article <7129@pucc.Princeton.EDU> BVAUGHAN@pucc.Princeton.EDU writes:
>That's when I realized what nonquantitative really meant. Even
>though FORTRAN IV had no character string handling capability
>(You had to declare your characters as INTEGER or REAL), I had to
>write a routine to read all keyboard input as characters, convert
>to numbers, and add a friendly message to explain what a number was.

Even if you're not dealing with "MBA types", you should always do this
in any serious program.  Even people who know what the correct
responses are supposed to be sometimes make typos.  You said that your
program performed range checks, so why did you consider syntax checks
unnecessary until the user screwed up?


Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar