Transitioning to gnucash

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 1/3/2017 6:49 PM, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Jan 2017, Dr. David Kirkby (Kirkby Microwave Ltd) wrote:
>
>> You should report this as a bug, if an invalid file causes an 
>> application
>> to crash. That should never happen, irrespective of whether the file is
>> .qif, .gmp, .jpg, .ext or anything else. Software should check the 
>> format
>> of the file and either parse it or not. It should not crash.
That is what is called "input editing"

Many decades ago, when in the "training pool" for my new job as 
programmer, I noticed that the "case problem" we had been given to write 
did not specify input editing. So I went to the instructors, pointing 
this out, and asking shouldn't I put in full input editing. They began 
laughing and told me "Don't do that Mike. If you do, you won't get the 
practice solving dumps we intended." (the idea was to drive home to us 
new programmers, don't trust the input. << actually, turned out I was 
solving the dumps so fast they moved me to an "advanced dumps class" 
going on the same time for programmers who had been on the floor a 
couple years.

A program should not hang regardless of how bad the input is. o yes, if 
it does, that's a bug. When writing a new program, you don't just give 
it the data as expected; you make sure it won't hang even if garbage 
coming in.

Michael D Novack