Re: Random thoughts on programming

One of my favorite goals which appears to sum up several of the more specific ones stated earlier (simple to state but not so simple to implement):

A program should always gracefully survive even the worst data.

Whether it carries on unperturbed with a warning message in a log, or dies but clearly spells out why (and does not frag the disk), will depend on the specific nature of the application. I was reminded of this today while trying to load a corrupt spreadsheet into Excel (which breaks all the rules 8-( ).

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser