Hmmmm. I don't know what has happened. A week ago or so I wrote a long reply to you. Yesterday I wondered why I had not heard from you so I checked my posts on Access World, and it turns out
that I have not sent you a reply on your last post. I wrote the answer in another editor than that on Access World and copied and pasted the text to Access World and deleted the original file.
I must have forgotten to press the Send button. Sorry about that.
So. You are a chemist. I have always regarded chemists as wizards. I cannot get my head around how on earth you guys discover all these things about those little tiny things. I remember that I once read that the
property that decides how sweet a substance is, is the angle between two bonds (is that what it is called in english?). I mean 1) how do you detect a bond, 2) once detected, how on earth do you estimate the angle between two of them?
One of my classmates, John, from high school is today an esteemed professor in chemistry. When I went to high school the highest mark one could get was 13. I was so rare to get a mark of 13 at examination that the newspapers
wrote about it if it happened. If you got a 13 as your mark for the year it was in the news on TV. Of course John got a 13 as his mark of the year in chemistry and it was well deserved. He was/is good.
Speeking about high school. Back then students at my high school were divided into two groups. One group thought that John's 13 was the most impressing mark ever obtained, the other group thought that one of my marks for the year
was the most impressing. My mark though was not considered for a good reason. In those days the second lowest mark you could obtain was 03. It was almost as rare as 13. I got a 03 as my mark for the YEAR in the subject of history
and it was well deserved. It required quite some effort to be scored that low
and disappointing that they did not write about my mark in the newspapers.
I actually considered studying chemistry back in the early eighties. But not for a good reason. I didn't know what subject of study I should choose at university and therefore I spent a year working as a bricklayer
trying to find out about what to do with the rest of my life. After a year of consideration I ended up with two subjects of study. Chemistry and Electronics but both of them were considered for a bad reason.
I considered Chemistry because it was the subject of study with most female students. I considered electronics because I had some difficulties understanding Ohm and Ampere and stuff like that in high school, so I thought
that if I studied it further I would begin to understand. I ended up choosing electronics, don't remember why. Bad choice. The first couple of years at university were fine. The assignments in electronics we got were pure math,
no need for a deeper understanding of the circuits we did calculations on. But then life began to be troublesome. The circuits we worked with started to be more complicated and in order for us to be able to do calculations on them
we started to leave out of account bits and pieces of the circuit because the current anyway through these parts were neglectable. I thought that was a mess. I mean, if it was a part of the circuit it should also be a part of the
the calculation. I simply couldn't get my head around just throwing things away. Finally one day I realized I had to do something else with my life than electronics. We had an assignment where we should explain why a circuit had
the same properties as an ideal inductor. It took the guys with a deeper understanding of electronics about 30 seconds to explain why the circuit in fact acted as wanted. I had to do 2 pages of math ending up with a formula showing
it but with no deeper understanding what so ever. That day turned out to be my last day at that university. I had some great years there and met the second love of my life (is that possible?). Math.
I can understand from reading your post that you are a quality guy. I have always claimed that it is impossible to write software without errors no matter how thoroughly you have tested it. It seems to me though
that you have been capable of doing that. Many plaudits for that from Denmark. I have actually once my self written a program i C, that behaved exactly as wanted and was 100% error free according to the requirements specification.
I had a colleague that needed to test how a certain thing behaved when a null-pointer exception happened in an application, so he asked me if I could write a program that caused such a null-pointer exception. Need I to say
that that was an easy one?
Enough from cold Denmark. I apologize for linguistic errors. Usually I have my eldest daughter, studying english, read my posts if they are important, but she is doing her final project at the moment at university
so I wouldn't disturb asking her to proofread.
One final thing. Are you familiar with regular expressions and if so, are you also a regular expression wizard?