11 Feb
2020
11 Feb
'20
10:03 p.m.
I call it automiscorrect. First, it is very easy to mistype on these touch based
interfaces and then they miscorrect using too large a vocabulary.
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.
On Feb 11, 2020, at 6:38 AM, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Amen. As a dyslexic (which most often shows when I'm typing as you folks have
experienced) autocorrect generally is a PITA. FWIW: Grammerly works well for me. It
underlines in dotted red and lets me look at what it thinks it should be - where I can
accept it or not.
Doug -- I agree DWIM was just silly.... UCB's Pascal system (pix) tried it also and
let's just say it failed as I explain in a comment /answer on quora
(https://www.quora.com/When-you-are-programming-and-commit-a-minor-error-suc…)
Clem
> On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 10:33 PM Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > What i like is the autocorrect feature in v8:
> >
> > $ cd /usr/blot
> > /usr/blit
> > $ pwd
> > /usr/blit
>
> Here I am, editor of the v8 manual and unaware of the feature.
> We now know that silent correction is a terrible idea.
>
> Postel's principle: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal
> in what you accept from others" was doctrine in early HTML
> specs, and led to disastrous disagreement among browsers'
> interpretation of web pages. Sadly, the "principle" lives on
> despite its having been expunged from the HTML spec.
>
> Today's "langsec" movement grew out of bitter experience
> with malicious inputs exploiting "liberal" interpretation of
> nonconforming data.
>
> Today's NYT has an article about fake knockoffs of George Orwell
> for sale on Amazon. It cites an edition of "Animal Farm"
> apparently pirated by lowgrade OCR autocorrected and never
> proofread. One of the many gaffes is that every instance of
> "iv" beame ChapterIV, as in "prChapterIVacy".
>
> I didn't like some Lisp systems' DWIM (do what I mean) when I
> first heard about the feature, and I like it even less 40-some
> years on. I would probably have remonstrated with Rob had I
> realized the shell was doing it.
>
> Doug