Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!vicorp!alan
From: alan@vicorp.UUCP (Alan Morse)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Message-ID: <830@vicorp.UUCP>
Date: 16 Feb 89 16:33:11 GMT
References: <69843@ti-csl.csc.ti.com>
Reply-To: alan@sunra.UUCP (Alan Morse)
Organization: V. I. Corporation, Amherst, Massachusetts
Lines: 14

About 15 years ago I took an introductory programming course, and
one of our first assignments was to write a fortran program to
print a multiplication table.  The assignment handout had an example
of the output, and said that students should turn in hardcopy that
matched the example.

While I was working on my terminal (hardcopy, this was before glass
terminals) I noticed that another student working next to me was
having a lot of trouble.  When I offered to help, she said,
"I can't seem to type this table without making a mistake, and if
I make a mistake, the output won't match the example in the handout."

She didn't realize that she was supposed to write a program to 
generate the output, and was trying to type it by hand.