tinman wrote:

please do understand that I have nothing but respect for you, and this is in no way meant to be anything like a personal attack :o)

tinman: no need to explain. Reasonable people can disagree and I have absolutely no issue with that. I gave your post a ++ because it was well thought out.

I think I could almost agree with you if MS gave the programmers the option to suppress these features. If I want to send my HTML docs with a content-type of "text/plain" and not have them rendered as HTML, I should be able to do that.

It used to bug me about Netscape that it wouldn't render a table that was missing a closing table tag. Now, however, I'm happy about that. How many designers out there are producing better tables because of that? Browsers have, for a long time, been very forgiving about bad HTML. What does that do? It encourages bad HTML. I don't claim to write perfect, W3 specs HTML, but I'm not bad. When I first started, however, my HTML was a mess. I didn't know it, though, browsers were so nice to me. Now I struggle to unlearn bad habits.

MS, by trying to second-guess programmers has allowed them to focus on quantity, not quality. Perl, on the other hand, while it definitely has a DWIM attitude, it's fairly well documented and predictable. Here are some examples that will definitely trip up new programmers, but once you understand what's going on, you can produce code that does what you intend without tripping up (those on the beginners-cgi mailing list will recognize this from today's emails):

my $number_of_pets = ('dog','cat','iguana');
print $number_of_pets;

my @pets = ('dog','cat','iguana');
$number_of_pets = @pets;
print $number_of_pets;

$number_of_pets = ('dog','cat',@pets);
print $number_of_pets;

@number_of_pets = ('dog','cat',@pets);
print scalar @number_of_pets;
[download]

All of those examples will generate consistent, reproducible results, even though the results will be strange to some. VBScript's date functions, by contrast, will have unpredictable results depening upon your data and your locale. This is not good. I don't mind DWIM, so long as it's predictable. I can't get that with MS. As a result, many MS programmers just kind of 'slide by' and hope things work. That's what I object to.

Cheers,
Ovid

Update: Hmm... twice in as many days, Abigail has come behind me and pointed out flaws in my logic. I am unused to Perl having locale dependant functions (since I've only used it in the US). On the other hand, since I programmed in VBScript in Amsterdam, locale was a much more serious issue. That's US-centric thinking for you.

That being said, there's still the issue of VBScript silently switching the month and day if it thinks the programmer screwed up. Ditto for IE ignoring the content-type header. I am not aware of any cases where Perl munges your data without your knowledge.

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