The Old New Thing

May 12, 2006 - The Old New Thing

On languages and spelling

May 12, 2006 May 12, 2006 05/12/06
Raymond Chen
When I brought up the topic of spelling bees earlier this year, it triggered several comments on how various languages deal with the issue of spelling. Here are some thoughts on the topics that were brought up: German spelling is only partly phonetic. Given the spelling of a word, one can, after applying a rather large set of rules, ...

When people mimic the display rather than the actual data

May 12, 2006 May 12, 2006 05/12/06
Raymond Chen
I recall a bug that we were investigating that was being caused by a registry key being set when it shouldn't have been. But when you looked at the key in Regedit, it say "(value not set)". Why were we going down the "value is set" branch? A little spelunking with the debugger revealed the reason directly: Whoever set up that registry key ...