“There was some date-checking going on–presumably to stop you entering a year during the Black Death”

Jon’s patience is tried by Covid-testing code, before he decides to replace his trusty all-in-one iMac with something small but perfectly formed

JON HONEY BALL

Writing good code is hard. As the old joke goes: if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Part of writing good code is defining the use cases, the allowable input data and the expected output ranges. At the lab, we’re heavy users of conditional cell formats in Excel: define an acceptable range for a result and highlight it if it goes out of range. It may not be perfect, but it can make it obvious that something is wrong, either due to a typo or an unexpected but correct input. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that any sort of numerical handling in an app or spreadsheet should be liberally smothered with appropriate handling and highlighting. It should be part of the basic techniques that we learn…

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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2021

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