Terry Hancock wrote: [...] > > The ideal of "don't repeat yourself" seems to get > nudged out by "repeat yourself exactly once" when it's > really important to get it right. ;-) > I suppose most readers aren't old enough to remember the punch card days, when you would hand your work in on coding sheets to the punch room and it would be punched onto cards using huge machines (anyone remember the 026 and 029 punches?).
Before you got the cards back they were processed twice: one operator would actually punch the cards, and another would re-key the same input on a verifier machine that alerted them to any differences between what was on the card and what was keyed. > It's really just a fancy way to force you to proof-read your > own work carefully enough (which is tricky because you > tend to ignore stuff that's too repetitious). > That's why two different operators would do the punching and the verifying. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com PyCon TX 2006 www.python.org/pycon/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
