From: utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!esquire!psl
Newsgroups: net.games.emp
Title: Re: Watch out for date set wrong!!!!!
Article-I.D.: esquire.358
Posted: Mon May 31 01:33:14 1982
Received: Mon May 31 05:20:16 1982


Unfortunately there are problems with trying to make the program too "smart",
too.  E.g. if I made it say "clock set wrong!" and dump you out when it sees
that your last log in was "after" the current time then all you'd need is to
have the same error the other way (i.e. Mortimer Snerd brings up the system and
tells it that it's 1983) and you log in happy as a clam with lots of BTUs and
then someone fixes the time and you can't log in for another year...
No, I couldn't make it clever enough to catch that because is might only be off
by a month and you don't want to be dumped out because you haven't played for
a month either...
Interactive Systems once got very "smart" in the tty driver and suppressed
sending out any carriage returns when your cursor was known to be in the first
column already.  This probably saved five or six character transmissions a day
on our system.  Then one day we got an Olympia Electronic Typewriter hooked up
to the system and it worked fine except it wouldn't double or triple space...
Sure enough, the Oly was ignoring  and doing carriage return and line feed
on receipt of .  I spent two weeks (off & on) wondering what kind of lemon
they had sent us.  I'd much rather have something go wrong in an obvious way
when the circumstances are obviously weird than have a "smart" system handle
one or two weird cases well and then blow up for "no reason" when everything
should be copacetic.
What?  Me defensive?
Peter (esquire!psl)