On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 11:03 AM Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> wrote:
I call it automiscorrect.
I've been known to same something similar.  Usually with a #$%^& before it.
 
First, it is very easy to mistype on these touch based interfaces and then they miscorrect using too large a vocabulary.
+1, amen brother Shah, amen,

At USC, back when I was a student, they started us off with PL/C, a subset of PL/I. The PL/C compiler tried its level best to make sense of the student programs it was given, with error messages such as “PL/C uses ....”. This was confusing to many students as they would do exactly what PL/C said it used and yet their program didn’t work.
FWIW: I referenced both PL/C and IBM PL/1 compiler in my quora answer. 
In an interactive world, offering a note like Grammerly's underline, seems reasonable to me - because it forces me to accept it.   The automatic doing it for me, is what I dislike - as you said, on touch interfaces it's twice as bad.

I remember having a conversation with Doug Cooper when we all were teaching the intro to CS course and I we were getting students turning in 'auto-corrected' code for assignments and wondering why the TAs were not amused.  I had thought that having the compiler tell you what was in error and then maybe offering a suggestion, might make sense, but there needed to be some action on the student's part to accept >>and<< repair to code before the compiler would produce something that 'ran.'

Anyway, I still think "Damn Warren's Infernal Machine" was always well named.

Clem