Jamie Longstreet-481950 (4/24/2010)

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I found the Hartree reference quoted in the American Mathematical Society Journal from 1960... I had half hoped that the "6" in 1960 along with the six possible answers were pointing me toward an answer of 1960 and the AMS article published in 1960 seemed to support that strongly but noticed as I pushed the button it said Trivia rather then Humor as a category. {/quote] I'm not sure why you think Humor as a category might have helped. Probably 6 options were too many - if I eever do another question lik ethat I'll maybe go for five options (or maybe severn?).

Studying the Manchester machine would not have helped. The machine in question was the Cambridge Machine.

No, certainly not (although EFC's attitude to NULL [he regarded it as essential] might well be regarded as a vote infavour of defensive probramming). The idea of the question was to remind writers of SQL (who, in my experience, generally regard defensive programming as something that those funny C++ programmers do, despite thae fact that C++ programmers almost never do it) that defensive programming dates from the earlliest times of programming (lomg before HLL's like Fortran or Cobol, let alone SQL or C# [or amazing LLL's like C and C++] had been invented) and is something that has to be done in whatever language you write in (including T-SQL) unless you have a divine dispensation that says your code will never encounter a problem.