books wasis: sorting

This reminds me of a PPOE where we really tightened up the input editing...

User: The system is rejecting all of our data! Us: Well, it's full of errors. User: But why can't you just accept it like you used to? Us: Because it was too much work cleaning up the mess aftewards. How can we, for instance, receive a shipment that hasn't already been sent? User: Well... just PROCESS it!

"Necessity is the mother of the re-invented wheel."

In the early '80s I helped a lot of shops convert from the Univac 9300 and 9400 to 90-30s. The 9300 and 9400 did no validation of packed decimal fields; they'd merrily do something with garbage characters, which would eventually get turned into valid digits that bore no relation to the input. But there were no program checks, and usually the errors were small enough that nobody noticed.

When we moved these files to the 90-30, our newly-ported programs started getting data checks here and there. It took a lot of digging to prove that the problem lay not in our programs but in the data that they were being fed. IMHO one of the worst flaws in the IBM 029 keyboard layout was that the vertical bar was right next to the numeral 1 (shift-Y and shift-U respectively). Even if you looked at an interpreted card, the difference between the two glyphs was small enough to make this particular typo very easy to miss. I think one of the scariest times was when I looked at a microfiche of an old mortage listing and found an entry where what people thought was a 1 turned out to really be a vertical bar.

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