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From: BVAUGHAN@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Barbara Vaughan)
Newsgroups: rec.humor,rec.humor.d,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Message-ID: <7136@pucc.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 9 Feb 89 22:11:53 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> <36279@think.UUCP>
Reply-To: BVAUGHAN@pucc.Princeton.EDU
Followup-To: rec.humor
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 24
Disclaimer: Author bears full responsibility for contents of this article

In article <36279@think.UUCP>, barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin) writes:

>In article <7129@pucc.Princeton.EDU> BVAUGHAN@pucc.Princeton.EDU writes:
>>That's when I realized what nonquantitative really meant.
I had to
>>write a routine to read all keyboard input as characters.
>>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?
>Thinking Machines Corp.

 As I said in my original posting, this was early 1970's; most input
 was still on punch cards.  The whole idea of "users"  other than
 programmers was a novel one.  My program was actually pretty
 advanced for its time.  In order to even make a syntax check, I had
 to write a number of string-handling functions myself.  The syntax
 checking and character-to-numeric conversions also noticeably slowed
 down operation of the program.  It could be argued that all in
 all it was better to let the thing bomb.  Maybe you're too young to
 remember computing in the early 70's.