Re: [9fans] ... in the Kingdom of Sources

[rog@vitanuova.com]

rob:
> doug:
> > We disagree about that, especially for standardized libraries.
> > The general purpose library needs to be general purpose, not
> > have some particular preconceived purpose.
>
> nonsense. you can't design a proper interface without some
> idea of how it's going to be used in practice.  interfaces
> designed with only generality in mind are cumbrous and
> ugly.

not to mention that both the interfaces in question are as general as
each other; they differ only in the relative implementation effort
required for certain functionalities.

doug:
> The trouble is, most programs are data transformers, and
> garbage in means garbage out *unless* the garbage is detected
> and an appropriate strategy used to deal with it.

"garbage in, garbage out" seems to imply that "garbage" is all or
nothing.  that's not the case here: the input can be littered with
pieces of garbage, and the question is whether we let one piece of
litter trash the whole input or just its locality.

> What is appropriate depends on the intended application.

given that the error has already occurred, what strategies might be
appropriate?  there aren't many possibilities here.

> But merely ignoring the fact that something is wrong and proceeding
> with the computation just propagates the error; it doesn't "fix" the
> situation.

the situation is not fixable at this point.  the error has already
occurred.  if you're parsing the text, there are likely to be many
other possible lexical analysis errors, and the plan 9 approach means
that a dud utf8 sequence can be treated in the same way without any
special code.

> I would hate to think that the codes sent to a respirator or pneumatic
> brake hadn't been correctly generated.

the input has already been incorrectly generated.

i'd hate to think that a code sent to a respirator or a pneumatic
brake was ignored because an earlier one had a formatting error.