On Friday 02 July 2010 10:18:23 Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:
It all depends on what you call "robustness." I'm a classicist, not a computer scientist or programmer, so I view software only from a user's perspective. But here's what I think about this: a system is robust when it behaves in a predictable and consistent manner. Maybe it's because I have begun writing some of my stuff in xml, or maybe it's because I'm an anal-retentive guy by nature, but I find the tree image of documents compelling: everything has to be part of a branch. And I read the examples you provide as proving me right: if a program asks "how many cycles?" and the user input is "yes," the only consistent and predictable behavior is throwing an error and reporting it to the user - "integer number expected" or some such. Processing "yes" will not allow the user to learn how to do this right. Everything else ("The program still had to handle this correctly") is just going to leave the user at the mercy of what someone somewhere defined for her/him.
I am a scientist, not a programmer (or computer scientist). We tend to be creative and act unpredictably. This leads to progress and innovation.
Moreover: maybe as a classicist, I find it natural to look at documents in the perspective of the "longue durée" - after all, we handle stuff that has been around for several millennia. Which means I see my TeX or whatever file not primarily as an instruction to typeset stuff in a certain way, but as a container to preserve information. Which means: ideally, I want my documents so well-structured that someone in the year 3010 will be able to extract the same information from them. The better they are structured, the more they respect a consistent model, the better the chances that this will happen. ... Which means you should think of your document as structured information, not as instructions for a certain device. Again, the better the document is structured, the more independent and reliable its transmission will be.
Redundancy ``... is the only thing which makes it possible to write a text which is longer than, say, ten pages. In other words, a language which has maximum compression would actually be completely unsuited to conveying information beyond a certain degree of complexity, because you could never find out whether a text is right or wrong. And this is a question of principle. It follows, therefore, that the complexity of the medium in which you work has something to do with redundancy.'' (Shannon 1949) I am researching (amongst other things) the structure of DNA. The information that it carries has survived much longer than the 1000 years between 2010 and 3010... Alan P.S. my favorite editor is vi - as I do make mistakes!