Re: [TUHS] V9 shell [was Re: Warner's Early Unix Presentation]

[Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>]

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I call it automiscorrect. First, it is very easy to mistype on these touch based interfaces and then they miscorrect using too large a vocabulary.

At USC, back when I was a student, they started us off with PL/C, a subset of PL/I. The PL/C compiler tried its level best to make sense of the student programs it was given, with error messages such as “PL/C uses ....”. This was confusing to many students as they would do exactly what PL/C said it used and yet their program didn’t work.

> On Feb 11, 2020, at 6:38 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Amen.  As a dyslexic (which most often shows when I'm typing as you folks have experienced) autocorrect generally is a PITA.   FWIW: Grammerly works well for me.  It underlines in dotted red and lets me look at what it thinks it should be - where I can accept it or not.   
> 
> Doug -- I agree DWIM was just silly.... UCB's Pascal system (pix) tried it also and let's just say it failed as I explain in a comment /answer on quora (https://www.quora.com/When-you-are-programming-and-commit-a-minor-error-such-as-forgetting-a-semicolon-the-compiler-throws-an-error-and-makes-you-fix-it-for-yourself-Why-doesn-t-it-just-fix-it-by-itself-and-notify-you-of-the-fix-instead). 
> 
> Clem
> 
> 
> 
>> On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 10:33 PM Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>> > What i like is the autocorrect feature in v8:
>> >
>> > $ cd /usr/blot
>> > /usr/blit
>> > $ pwd
>> > /usr/blit
>> 
>> Here I am, editor of the v8 manual and unaware of the feature.
>> We now know that silent correction is a terrible idea.
>> 
>> Postel's principle: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal
>> in what you accept from others" was doctrine in early HTML
>> specs, and led to disastrous disagreement among browsers'
>> interpretation of web pages. Sadly, the "principle" lives on 
>> despite its having been expunged from the HTML spec.
>> 
>> Today's "langsec" movement grew out of bitter experience
>> with malicious inputs exploiting "liberal" interpretation of
>> nonconforming data.
>> 
>> Today's NYT has an article about fake knockoffs of George Orwell
>> for sale on Amazon.  It cites an edition of "Animal Farm"
>> apparently pirated by lowgrade OCR autocorrected and never
>> proofread. One of the many gaffes is that every instance of
>> "iv" beame ChapterIV, as in "prChapterIVacy".
>> 
>> I didn't like some Lisp systems' DWIM (do what I mean) when I
>> first heard about the feature, and I like it even less 40-some
>> years on. I would probably have remonstrated with Rob had I
>> realized the shell was doing it.
>> 
>> Doug

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