29 Jun
2011
29 Jun
'11
11 a.m.
Using another one of the most gross and obvious
examples, in general
English text, the letter following a 'Q' is generally a 'U', except in
characters within acronyms or within or part numbers; in political text,
I beleive the original poster was talking about a program source listing.
The problem, there, of ocurse is variable names. Yes, in English, a
single-letter word is likely to be 'A' or 'I' (or maybe 'O'), but
single-letter variable names are common (yes, I know you _should_ use
descriptive names, but I am sure we've all used 'X' and 'Y' a lot,
along
with 'I' for a loop couter, 'S' and 'T', etc). It gets worse, of
course,
if the language only allowed variable names of a single letter or a
letter followed by a digit (as did some versions of BASIC).
if a word ends in 'q', the word is so likely
to be Iraq that much effort
can be saved by just looking for confirmation of that rather than
struggling with uncertain characters before looking at the word.
Likewise in THIS context, the word ending in 'q' is most likely Compaq.
Err, round here a word ending in 'q' is likely to be 'Perq' :-)
-tony