Circa 1971 I had a summer student intern working with me. He was a brilliant and immodest programmer who knew nothing about mainframes except that working witrh them would be easy.. I gave him the problem of writing a reentrant pseudo-random-number generator in the language of the F assembler.
When he showed it to me proudly I discovered that it was full of the belt-and-braces constructs being discussed here. I thought for a moment, and I began my critique with This is highly intelligent. If the machine in fact worked the way you think it works, these precautions would be necessary; but . . . Analogously, some three year olds who are learning English say 'goed' instead of 'went'. The proper response to this is not "That's wrong"; it is something like, "Your guess is a good one. Most verbs are like that, but some of them are not. This one borrows its past tense from "wend", etc., etc. Adults can make such mistakes too. Speaking to me in English, an Italian colleague recently used the word "evitable". My response, in his language, was something like: In Italian both "evitabile" and "inevitabile" are in current use. "Evitable" does exist in English. Sir Thomas Browne used it. Still, if you want to be understood immediately in English by any but the very intelligent, who will decode it with a lapse of a few milliseconds even if they don't know it, use "avoidable" instead of "evitable". I indeed think that mistakes of this kind at an early stage in learning a language are characteristic of intelligent learners. They need to be corrected, gently and in circumstantial detail; but laughing at them is both provincial and counter-productive. John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
