> So what SHOULD the application do about something like that? > The answer goes back to that point I made in an earlier item > about data integrity. If you don't KNOW what the field is supposed to > contain, stop everything, report the failure, and let someone > fix it. It seems inconvenient, but in the long run, often > it's the safest course.
Another observation: in the old days at Xerox, there were a series of functions in the Dandelion OS that were supposed to handle situations like this -- the DWIM (Do What I Meant) calls. They tried to do fixups on the fly for this kind of thing. These were HORRIBLE bits of code -- imagine trying to guess what any bozo programmer really wanted, fix up their code to do that, and all that w/o slowing down the system (oh, yes, and the entire hack was in Common LISP, running directly on the bare metal). E-vil. S0c4 is a much better response. -- db
