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Content-type: text/plain
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bob Walkden [mailto:bob{([at]})nowhere.xy
>
> Therefore, if you execute CAP with a non-letter character, all bets
> are off. This is rather unfortunate. It would have been better to
> define a result for the non-letter case. It should have returned
> either the same character that was input, or it should have returned a
> value such as 0X, indicating 'no corresponding capital'.
>
The consequences of returning 0X as an error result may be even more
confusing to the uninformed programmer than the current behaviour. Any
attempt to convert a string, character by character, using CAP would simply
truncate the string at the first non-letter.
However, this would be preferable to returning the same character for a
non-letter case as this approach silently disguises the underlying logic
error. It makes no more sense to pass a non-letter to the CAP function than
to assign chalk to cheese. While the consequences of this error may be
benign in many cases, they will not always be so.
While the current implementation gives the ultimate in performance it also
provides some chance of early detection of an error condition. Presumably,
it was a detection of this sort that led H. v. Lavergne to initiate this
discussion.
Regards,
Chris Burrows
CFB Software
info{([at]})nowhere.xy
http://www.cfbsoftware.com
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Received on Sat Sep 18 2004 - 06:54:58 UTC