Another future exam question: Identify the intermediate programming error in the following screenshot from a major web standards organization:
What likely happened here, and how could it have been avoided?
1. I am Unicode, thy character set. Thou shalt have no other character sets before me.
2. Thou shalt carefully specify the character encoding and the character set whenever reading a text file.
3. Thou shalt not refer to any 8-bit character set as “ASCII”.
4. Thou shalt ensure that all string handling functions fully support characters from beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane. Thou shalt not refer to Unicode as a two-byte character set.
5. Thou shalt plan for additions of future characters to Unicode.
6. Thou shalt count and index Unicode characters, not UTF-16 code points.
7. Thou shalt use UTF-8 as the preferred encoding wherever possible.
8. Thou shalt generate all text in Normalization Form C whenever possible.
9. Thou shalt avoid deprecated characters.
10. Thou shalt not enter the private use area.
A future exam question: Identify the elementary programming error in the following actual output from a real web store.
Bonus credit: describe both the quick emergency fix for the problem, and the longterm fix for the problem.
Greetings from CellularFactory.com. We thought you'd like to know that we shipped your items, and that this completes your order. Your order number is ###### Please keep this number for any future requests You can track the status of this order, and all your orders, online by visiting our page at http://www.CellularFactory.com/help/shipping.jsp The following items have been shipped to you by CellularFactory.com: --------------------------------------------------------------------- Qty Item Price Shipped Subtotal --------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Travel Charger 5.89 2008-02-09 5.89 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Shipped via USPS (estimated arrival date: about 4-6 days after) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Item Subtotal 5.89 Shipping & Handling: 3.99 Total: 9.879999999999999 -------------------------------------------------------------------- This shipment was sent to:
The call for papers for Software Development 2008 West is now live. What follows are abstracts for some talks that I am not giving, but that I very much hope someone else will present. If anyone feels like submitting one of these under their own name, I’ll champion it when the advisory board goes over the submissions.
Ruby is the fastest growing programming language of the new millennium. Through interactive exercises, this full day, hands on tutorial will bring programmers from zero to sixty with the language including:
Steve Yegge tantalizes us with a post on the next big language, but he won’t say what it is. A lot of people think he’s talking about JavaScript, but I’m betting he’s writing about Groovy.
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