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Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!bellcore!texbell!petro!swrinde!kent
From: kent@swrinde.swri.edu (Kent D. Polk)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,rec.humor.d,rec.humor
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Message-ID: <9971@swrinde.swri.edu>
Date: 20 Feb 89 18:46:10 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: kent@swrinde.UUCP (Kent D. Polk)
Followup-To: comp.misc
Organization: Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas
Lines: 27

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.

A few years back I had to write a program in Pascal with 'bullet-proof' input
routines for use by office staff with little knowledge of anything other than
wordprocessors.

Well, I thought I'd be smart & only accept allowable characters to be entered
and otherwise beep at them, so I wrote a multi-level keyboard entry routine
to which I would send a set of allowable characters for each entry.  Well,
since my documentation explained this feature, the group I wrote it for
decided to test it in their acceptance test. When I received the test report,
they noted that my input routines didn't work correctly.  Then I noticed in
the appendix, a list of the keys that they felt were in error. This list
included 'Control + M', 'Control + H', ... etc.  (They knew about the control
key from their wordprocessors).

I tried to explain to them how control sequences work, that I couldn't fix it
in software, and that it wouldn't be very desirable to change the terminals
to not generate the control sequences, and they finally relented. I really
don't think they believed me though.

Kent Polk