Fatal Exception Error (1/20/2010)

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Lynn Pettis (1/20/2010)

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It isn't just the QotD that you can learn from, but also the discussion that may follow (as long as you ignore the complaints).

Does SSC vet the questions, to a point, but not nearly as well as some people would like to see. Of all the questions I have answered, I think I only really had a serious complaint about one or two. Yes, there are issues with some of the questions, but if you look closer at the concept that the question is trying to address, and less on the question and answers themself, I think you will learn something.

Take today's question. Based on the answers, you'd have expected there to be PRINT statements in the question but there wasn't. If you understand the concept of the TRY/CATCH, and that the divide by zero would be caught and handled in the CATCH part of the code, there really was only one answer that made sense, and it happened to be the only one with the message from the PRING statment in the CATCH block.

I strongly disagree. I am not trying to be a jerk but this is not the first time people have complained about ambiguous answers from arup.

What concept do new people get from incorrect answers as options? None of the answers fit at all. The fact that you assumed you knew what the author meant and selected your answer based on an assumption and not knowing proves this. What if I assumed the author missed a PRINT @i.

I learned nothing from this except:

-there can be mingling between result set and messages in the answer for a QoTD.

-It is now possible for an integer field to display a string in the answer for the QoTD.

-Ambiguity is now acceptable for listed answers to the QoTD just like irregardless is now accepted as a word by dictionaries.