🚀 go-pugleaf

do...@tsa.co.uk (Dominic Dunlop) writes:

>In article <900917045...@lilac.berkeley.edu> (sorry, lost your
>name) writes:
>> We have a very dumb
>> secretary, and whenever software asked her to "press any key", she'd press
>> Shift, Control, or Alt, and then run to everyone complaining that the system
>> didn't work. Eventially everyone's become convinced that she's too dumb to
>> remember that 'any' key means the space bar, or use a computer in general,
>> which may have been her secret goal, since it reduced her workload. :)

>Little or no offence meant, but I think some of us have planks in our
>eyes...

>Hey, who are you accusing of stupidity?  ``Press any key'' means ``Press
>ANY key''.  This person was quite right to complain that she'd been lied
>to by programmers who should have known better, but who had allowed the
>fact that they had a well-formed mental model of the way that computers
>operate to prevent them from realising the large majority of the
>population posesses no such model.

>Dumb (or at least thoughtless) programmers, say I, not dumb users.
>A smart programmer would have anticipated this problem, and ensured that
>it didn't arise in the first place.
>-- 
>Dominic Dunlop

I am currently developping a program in turbopascal 5.5 on an
IBM pc. When a compilation is finished, the program shows
a message "success, press any key". If I hold down the
ALT key, the line of help at the bottom of the screen changes,
to show some of the ALT-key combination. The "press any key"
message does not go away! The program KNOWS that I have pressed a
key, but chooses to ignore it! 

Klaus Kristiansen