> "It's safe to say that whoever is storing phone numbers as integers either didn't study or didn't receive a proper education on the inner workings of a computer."
...or that they didn't absorb it. A lot of the comments on this post are indignantly claiming that "anyone who has taken a CS class...", as if every lesson of every class is perfectly absorbed by every student. As someone who teaches CS, I assure you that we discuss appropriate data representation right from the start, but I can attest to the fact that even students who did understand the general lessons about strings vs. ints (vs. other things) sometimes aren't great at applying it.
And while decent testing should have caught this, sure, test-driven design and effective regression testing was long an on-the-job training sort of thing; good testing as an integral part of the programming process was not a widespread part of the ugrad CS curriculum until fairly recently (and is far from universal even now).
...or that they didn't absorb it. A lot of the comments on this post are indignantly claiming that "anyone who has taken a CS class...", as if every lesson of every class is perfectly absorbed by every student. As someone who teaches CS, I assure you that we discuss appropriate data representation right from the start, but I can attest to the fact that even students who did understand the general lessons about strings vs. ints (vs. other things) sometimes aren't great at applying it.
And while decent testing should have caught this, sure, test-driven design and effective regression testing was long an on-the-job training sort of thing; good testing as an integral part of the programming process was not a widespread part of the ugrad CS curriculum until fairly recently (and is far from universal even now).