Re: 3rd Party compatibility

[John Darrington]

All right.  I'll see how much effort it'll be to make it work.
But if it turns out to be a real nightmare, then I'm not going 
to spend a lot of time on it, unless there's a huge demand to 
be able to parse these files.

In my experience, making programs bug-for-bug compatible only leads
to very messy and unmaintainable code.

J'

On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 11:36:07AM -0400, Wilson,Tom wrote:
      
     I agree.  If we can be flexible, lets do it.

     John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > So the question is:  Should we
     >
     > a) emulate SPSS's ability to read this faulty system file (for the 
     >    sake of 'compatibility')?
     >
     > b) prefer 'correctness' and leave these guys to fix their own buggy 
     >    (and proprietary) product?
     
     Let's make it work.  What advantage is there in being incompatible,
     except for some putative "moral high ground"?
     Software should be liberal in what it accepts, strict in what it
     produces.
     
     If you feel like making it work now, feel free; otherwise, I'd encourage
     you to file a "wishlist" bug.

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