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Comment by af78 | Hacker News Reader

Well, one can turn X into XX or XXX... And handwritten prescriptions have become rare where I live, these days.

And as per the instruction of 1919 "it is customary to draw a line above all letters making up the number, the dots of i and j being put above the line" (in other words, the horizontal line is directly above v, x, c, and so on but between the dot of i and j and the lower part of the letter).

I think this way it is difficult to add more Roman digits like x to fake a higher amount than prescribed.

The letter j seems to be an additional security because i as a letter is narrow and one could perhaps squash in one or two more i's. The instruction also mentions that the number of dots is important, if the number of i and j is not the same as the number of dots above the line, the apothecary should assume an error.

What prevented someone from just extending the line?

> I think this way it is difficult [...]

It's just difficult, but not impossible.

This said, such tampering is in my jurisdiction punishable by law (Art. 251 Forgery of a document), see https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/54/757_781_799/en#art_251

I am sure in Common Law jurisdiction forgery of documents is also punishable.

So such things are defended by a two-pronged approach: Make it difficult and forbid it.

Someone forging a number is already going to the trouble to find seclusion so that they are unobserved, and to try to match the writing instrument (color, stroke and texture) and the handwriting of the existing digits.

A horizontal square bracket would have been a more effective deterrent than just a line.

So find a time machine and travel back and tell the people of your superior solution.

scnr

My point is more that the people of the past weren't stupid; they didn't believe that a horizontal line couldn't be easily extended by a forger to hang over newly added digits. Rather, our explanation today is lacking; there must have been some other reason for the practice. Or no reason other than that someone stated it and it become something that is always done that way.

Checks are quite foolproof too - spelling out the number (a hundred eighty eight) and writing the number (188), like on checks.

The paragraph you mention seems to worry more about mistakes more than tempering attempts though (taking 10x the dose prescribed could indeed be problematic)

The important part there is the termination characters. "Dollars" / "Pounds only" etc. and the decimal point (though that's easier to turn into a comma and make into thousands... Funnily enough the German way of using comma as the decimal separator avoids this)

Yeah, we've tried null-terminated strings and it wasn't fun. Better use a more explicit, highly visible character.

Polish still regularly does this for contracts and all kinds of legal document.

I regularly see verbiage like "person A promises to pay person B 100 (in words, one hundred) zloty upon termination of this contract."

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