[GTALUG] Old and New Habits...

[Peter King]

I just was in an extended argument with my two daughters, about 
something I suspect might be a generational thing.  Let me know what you 
think.

So the discussion started with me complaining that "because" Google 
respects neither uppercase/lowercase nor punctuation in their email, I 
get lots of email addressed to people whose email is similar to mine.  I 
myself have always thought that the problem was that Google's email 
address parser did not respect these differences, as they should, and so 
I wind up receiving email meant for someone in Great Britain with a 
similar name.

My daughters argued vigorously that this is not a bug but a feature -- 
you wouldn't want people to have to pay attention to either cases or 
punctuation when you write your email!

I replied that back when there was a net but no web of course you paid 
attention to these differences: we were all trained as programmers to be 
careful about punctuation and case.  (Hell, I learned on punch cards.)

Their view was that this was a dumb view and that I wasn't in fact 
getting email for everyone who signed up for email with some version of 
peter.king.1 at gmail.com, but also peterking1 at gmail.com, 
peterking.1 at gmail.com, and so on, but only when other people -- like, 
say, peter.king.11 at gmail.com -- mistyped their email addresses when 
signing up for some service or other (for instance leaving off the last 
digit).

The discussion was inconclusive, to say the least, and I thought (and 
think!) that we should respect case and punctuation.  But I certainly 
hadn't considered the arguments against it...

Thoughts?  Experiences with gmail?  Reflections on generational 
differences in the approach to computing?

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king at utoronto.ca
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-3311 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
        CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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