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Sun Apr 8 01:02:17 EDT 2001 · http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2001-April/086781.html

"Steven D. Arnold" <stevena at neosynapse.net> wrote in message
news:mailman.986699410.532.python-list at python.org...
> If you haven't already, please disregard the mail I sent to python-list;
it
> was the result of an accident.
>
> I hate when that happens. ;-)
>
This would be which, particularly, of the fifteen-or-so-postings I've just
read? If you're talking about the HTML, such mistakes happen to all of  us.
I even read some of the postings <wonk>... don't apologise, we all make
mistake. Just to underline my own capacity for idiocy, here's how I learned
to test even small changes thoroughly.

Way back in the 1960's I was employed to write a program for a scaffold
manufacturer. It was to produce weekly stock movement reports, and since the
manufacturer owned a lot af scaffold and had over sixty branches the report
was usually a whopping three hundred pages or so, on three-part listing --
the operators even had to strip carbon out as they decollated the listings.
We are talking several pounds of paper here.

I decided, in my youthful naiivety, that it would be nice on week fifty to
add an extra line to the heading which read "AND A HAPPY CHRISTMAS FROM
STEVE HOLDEN AND ANDY PARTRIDGE" (I didn't mean to shout, but the 1403
printer we used didn't extend to a lower-case print chain). Andy was the
systems analyst.

Since this "was such a small change" I just put it into the program and
didn't run a test. As luck would have it I left the company about September,
and thought no more about it until the following July, when I happened to
meet one of my former colleagues at a a service bureau where I was doing
some programming. Talk fell to the previous employer, and I happened to
enquire after the senior programmer. I was told to run, not walk, the other
way if I ever saw him, and obviously asked why.

It turned out that my "small change" to the print-header routine had
actually been made to the print-line routine, as a result of which shortly
before Christmas the 300-page report had become a 600-page report, in which
every other line read "AND A HAPPY CHRISTMAS FROM STEVE HOLDEN AND ANDY
PARTRIDGE".

that-kind-of-christmas-doesn't-come-every-year-so-now-i-test-everything-ly
y'rs  - steve

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