But think about it - how much could we increase productivity by not including silent letters? French productivity could go up 1000%!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! It *has* always mystified me why the French language includes so many letters that are not pronounced.
Of course, English has more than its fair share of anti-patterns, exceptions, oddities and eccentricities.
OK I looked up the actual code. If you turn on "wildcards" you can use the X{Y,Z} expression to find anwhere between Y-Z of X. So you if you:
find: <space character>{2,1000}
replace <space character>
then click replace all, you will immediately replace all multiples of 2-1000 spaces with a single space if that's your goal
I sometimes use what you suggest to make sure I don't have any triple spaces in my documents.
Does Word also support open-ended repeated characters, like {2,} ? That would match any number (>2) of spaces.
Whenever some exception happens, instead of trying to understand what's actually happening, they just throw their hands up and say oh well the instructions don't explain this...
I don't know how these people expect to get anywhere in life.
You just have to wrap them in a try/catch handler
Failing that - just delete them and cleanup their resources
*snort* Or you could include a bunch of try/catch-type structure in your instructions, and see if users can figure it out :)
Along a similar line of thought, it has always impressed me how the instructions for the 1040 form are so well-written. Seriously, if you've done your own taxes before, the IRS has done a
remarkable job of making the whole process very parseable.
(yes, I'm a Java programmer (among many other things) at my day job)