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Subject:Reversing errors is trivial? From:"Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Thu, 24 Dec 1998 02:46:30 -0700
Charlotte Hybschmann Jacobsen writes <<Another one of Cooper's
statements are that every action a user take should be reversible,
that is no matter what you do, you can undo it again. My developers
agree but they also tell me that this often takes a lot of
programming effort to effectuate.>>
To effectuate? <g> Actually, in the grand hierarchy of programming
tasks, implementing an "undo" function is the next best thing to a
trivial task. All you need to do is save the entire file to disk
after each keystroke. If you don't like what just happened, reload
the file from the previous copy upon pressing cmd-Z. In fact, if
operating systems routinely did this sort of thing, losing data to a
crash would be rare enough to be a remarkable event. Online
transaction processing systems (OLTPs) do something similar, at least
in intent. Now before anyone takes me to task on this statement, let
me emphasize that there are unquestionably more elegant ways to do
this. But "a lot of programming effort"? Not by any stretch of the
imagination.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
