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On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 04:21:16PM -0500, Michael G Schwern wrote:
> How hard is it to strip out non-digits from input, people?!
Just read this on AskTog[0] and felt it deserved to be preserved along with
this thread:
> In 1960, I worked at Bank of America on the ERMA project. ERMA was the
> worlds first electronic check processing computer. It had core memory -
> ferrite beads suspended from wires - and vacuum tubes. The memory was
> infinitesimal - less than that of the original Apple One, and the speed was
> hundreds of times slower. Programmers in those days did not throw away bits
> or clock cycles. Both were precious commodities.
>
> Guess what? It's now a different century! Computers have what can only be
> described as gobs of memory, along with blinding speed, speed so extreme
> that only the finest operating system developers in the world can bring them
> to a crawl.
>
> So why can't I input my credit card number the way it appears on the card?
> Why do I have to suck the extra spaces out, making it all but impossible to
> re-scan it for errors? We're talking three spaces here, three bytes. We're
> talking a loop to scan for those characters that can be accomplished in a
> couple of microseconds.
>
> What possible reason exists today for writing third-rate code that was no
> longer acceptable by the late 1970s? How much money is your company willing
> to lose to put up with it? When are you going to demand that people be able
> to enter dates in the way they are most comfortable, enter credit card
> numbers in the way they are most comfortable, and enter social security
> numbers with the hyphens as either God or Roosevelt intended?
[0] http://asktog.com/columns/062top10ReasonsToNotShop.html
--
Earle Martin
http://downlode.org/
http://purl.oclc.org/net/earlemartin/
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