5 ms·
I got in to an argument in school with my computer programming teacher. A BASIC course, we were having to design a system to accept an address, and I was treat
by mgkimsal 12y ago
I got in to an argument in school with my computer programming teacher. A BASIC course, we were having to design a system to accept an address, and I was treating my ZIP code as a string.
IIRC, something like
50 INPUT "Your ZIP code?", ZIP$
Everything was reviewed via handwritten code and flowchart before we were allowed to type it in in the lab, and I was told "ZIP code is a number, but you're putting it in to a string, that's wrong, fix it".
"But a ZIP code starting with 0 would then not have the 0 at the front when we show it back to the user" I said.
"ZIP codes don't start with 0"
Me: "Some do"
Her: "No, they don't"
I lived in Michigan, but was a huge infocom fan, and they were in MA, and had a leading 0 in their ZIP code. We argued about this for a good few minutes, and it wasn't until I brought in something the next day that demonstrated legit ZIP codes starting with 0 that I 'won'. Crap like this reinforced my distrust of authority and cynicism in life (for better or worse).
EDIT: Anyone else remember the "New Zork Times" newsletter? :)
EDIT 2: It wasn't until much later that I learned the ZIP code system we had wasn't actually completely formed until after she was at least a teen, if not a full adult - she simply wasn't exposed to stuff that I was earlier, it didn't really impact her, and she just assumed they were all numbers with no leading 0s. In some ways a minor point, but... it also taught me about stuff I took for granted not always having been there, even something as basic as addresses. Didn't really learn that until much later after that class.
- a3n 12y ago"I am the authority in these matters." " Why?" "Because I am in authority."
- ghaff 12y ago>EDIT: Anyone else remember the "New Zork Times" newsletter? :) Yep. I went to school with a bunch of the Infocom guys and was an unofficial beta tester for them at one point.
- mgkimsal 12y agodid they have any clue how groundbreaking their stuff was at the time?
- Retra 12y agoPeople really need to learn the difference between ordinal, cardinal, and nominal numbers... And what 'semantics' are.
- onion2k 12y agoAre ZIP codes actually number? I'd say they're really numeric strings, and should be handled as strings.
- zaroth 12y agoThe worst is when you store it as a string, having learned from others' mistakes, but then upon exporting to CSV... Excel kindly strips the leading 0 and you get a bug report that your software is screwing up the ZIP codes! Took a bit of searching before finding this: https://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/handling-leading-zero-in-csv/ https://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/handling-leading-zero-in...
- WatchDog 12y agoExcel is the bane of my existence. I give a lot of speeches about how to preserve data precision. However It seems to be largley in vain, as there is often a lot of back and forth when handling data between different groups, even programmers don't seem immune from screwing up a csv file with excel.
- UrMomReadsHN 12y agoOh god office workers love putting everything in Excel. Even when it makes no sense...
- TeMPOraL 12y agoCan't blame them. The only other choice they usually have is some crappy, poorly thought "database system" written by IT people who are poster children of this article. I'm a programmer and I defend use of Excel in the offices - I've actually worked in such an office before and I know that all the alternatives suck more. And I guess that's one of the biggest mistake programmers make - assuming that real-life data will conform to some imaginary, bureaucratic, fixed format. Even schemas ain't fixed in real life. That's why people use Excel.
- mgkimsal 12y agoThe other awesome is taking a screenshot, pasting it in to MS Word, then mailing the docx file. The entire screenshot then ends up being 3 inches across.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoI remember when we did MS Access basics in my ICT class in what Americans would call middle school, and my teacher correctly mentioned that a telephone number is text, not a number. :)