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Re: [Nmh-workers] mh-format multiply function

2015-01-11 15:28:19
norm@dad.org wrote:
David Levine <levinedl@acm.org> writes:

In general, if something goes wrong, the user should be
informed.  Especially here, given that a user has a lot of
flexibility in what they can put into a format.  And it's
for the user to put something in that doesn't do what they
mean.  While it might not (but could) be a huge problem when
showing a message, I'm more concerned about outgoing
messages.  Something might get left out, or put in
inadvertently, due to unexpected format behavior.  While
it's my responsibility to look at every character in every
outgoing message, as messages get bigger and more complex,
that gets harder.  I'd like all the help I can get from the
tools.

Wouldn't the stderr from the procedure tend to mitigate that?


It might make a good M.S. history thesis to find out why it wasn't
there already.

I was wondering about it, too.  Here's the commit that added divide,
but not multiply:

revision 1.2
date: 1990/02/21 15:39:50;  author: sources;  state: Exp;  lines: +71 -61
Fixes from Van Jacobson

I suppose that's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jacobson. He is apparently
still alive so our History graduate student could cheat by asking him

probably it simply never occurred to him that multiply wasn't already
there.  ;-)

paul
=----------------------
 paul fox, pgf@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 21.9 degrees)

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