Making things the hard way

[DerVVulfman]

That is not the way I was taught in regards of programming. Then again, I was taught structured languages such as Cobol which is used for business programming.

One should teach a programmer to include safeguards to prevent errors from occurring, not teach them to forego errors so they appear. And whilst my revision of your calendar month code has a safeguard, it still replies with an 'invalid' heading. It doesn't cause a downfall and sudden crash of the program, and still allows the user to see the month title as such. Then again, your code too includes a line ( "invalid",) in the event of an invalid value. Just throw a command of int_month(0) into the system. A month of 0 is invalid, correct?

One should always strive for error-free code, and all functions/methods should be expected to perform with proper data, or recognize data that is invalid and have a way to handle such. Certainly safeguards should be put into place to handle the testing of bitmaps before they are disposed. And of functions and methods receiving values unexpected or not worth processing, one should always account for such events.

I think you should recognize that programming is a mixture of both the logical and empirical. When we study, we observe and run tests for both observation and practice. When we develop a system, we do so with the understanding and logic of how the systems work as our foundation. I would suggest that merely those learning are those coding empirically. However, those that continue will develop their own guidelines and theories how to code based upon such study.

The hard way to code is where one allows errors to constantly creep up because one does not plan ahead. This forces one to repeatedly hunt for the error unseen and constantly make fix after fix. Typos not withstanding.