Falsehoods programmers believe about geography
wiesmann.codiferes.net
wiesmann.codiferes.net
"In order to handle all of these clever edge cases, your [Time|Date|Name|Address|Gender] handling code should be 2,000 lines long, not 2 lines long."
Which is not very helpful if you're just trying to get your product out. Sure, you could take another week to make sure you handle that hamlet in Macedonia whose name isn't a text string, but then again, why not just slap in "address" "city" "state" and "zip" fields and get on with the rest of your actual product? The naive solution covers pretty much all of the USA market. Hell, call those last two "state/province" and "zip/postcode" and you've got most of the world handled. Fix the edge cases in V2, if you even have to.
The message is that the real world is messy so don't spend 2000 lines of code trying to validate it to a strict (simplistic) model.
For example my bank's website couldn't deal with the fact that my street address was (representative example) "5/3 Hawthorn Street" because the '/' was an illegal character (as was -,: and a whole bunch of other separators I tried) - but that's how it appears in the Post Office's database. Some programmer has spent effort to implement the code to reject my legal (and incredibly common) style of address. It would have been far less effort not to have done that.
By contrast the DVLA website just gives you a free input text area, perfect. Minimal effort for them, zero hassle for me.
1) Every place is in a country.
2) The precise location of country borders is globally agreed and does not vary from country to country.
2) The list of countries is globally agreed and does not vary from country to country.
Apologies for bringing in hotly disputed territories of the world, but that's basically what this thread is about. I'm not making a political argument for or against any of those places, just saying that there is disagreement.
That said, I would (and do) use ISO two letter codes to identify territories in my code.
I also recall receiving a sad email from my colleges in Yugoslavia describing how the country was splitting up and how we where to adjust our routing tables.
4) Every nation has some defined set of borders. (The Yemen-Saudi Arabia border was only recently agreed, and was previously left deliberately ambiguous.)
5) Countries do not overlap. (Counterexample: France and Spain agree they both own Pheasant Island in the Pyrenees. The administration cycles every six months.)
6) Borders are at fixed coordinates. (Except for some borders defined by a river, which change when the river shifts its course. Some subnational borders are certainly like this.)
7) A nation's borders can be drawn with a single stroke of the pen. (Counterexample: South Africa takes two, one for the outside and one for its enclave Lesotho.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Separation_of_contine...
Are you sure you're not mixing them up? I'm asking because I've seen people mix them up so frequently, in some cases you can even find notices in geoography books making this clear.
There's another one, too, over which I've had internet arguments before. In that one, the USA and Canada are "America", while the rest of the continent is "South America".
The given reason was: it is not called "United States of North America", it's just "America". The rest of the countries are south from there, so all that region is "South America". I don't know how extended this vision is, though (nor I know where it fits Mexico).
Postal addresses correspond to political boundaries.
(Postal addresses are closer to delivery routes; a ZIP code can cover multiple, distinct, non-adjoining towns in a non-compact area; the 'town' in the postal address can be different from the town in which the address is located; ZIP codes can change if the delivery routes are changed.)
- when countries appear or disappear there's some sort of logical predecessor/successor country
- internet address suffixes correspond to a single country
- a country has only one internet address suffix
- you can tell what country someone is in by their IP address
- people don't move from one country to another
- well, at least companies don't move from one country to another
- a country has a single language
- a country has a single currency
- a currency is used in a single country
- the currency used in a country doesn't change over time
- a country has a single legal system
- a country has a single tax system
...
The UK doesn't.
Really? Do people actually believe this?
Some "common" counties off the top of my head:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Belgium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Canada
Let me also add: the only languages spoken in a country are the official languages of that country
Someone else already pointed out that the city that houses the Dutch government has to different, equally valid names (and is also not the capital).
Not only are there addresses that lack street names, there are also addresses that lack house numbers or towns. It wouldn't surprise me if there are addresses that lack a zip/postal code in a country that normally uses them.
Then there's reassigning addresses to other houses. The original building stays, but gets a new address. I'm a victim of this: a nearby swimming pool had my address until 15 years ago, but I still get a ton of their mail. Clearly in those 15 years, a lot of their contacts never bothered to update their address data. (Or maybe nobody expects a swimming pool to move.)
Edit: Beyond regular enclaves, there's of course also the crazy of Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog. It's bits of Belgian enclaves in Netherland, some of which in turn contain Dutch enclaves. The country you're in can change every other house. It's possible all your neighbours live in a different country than you. I'm not sure if it's possible a single house is in two different countries at the same time. Maybe the front door in one country and the back door in another? Exactly who gets to maintain the streets, I have no idea.
Links: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Baarle-Nassau&hl=en&ll=51.442...
A GPS position describing a location will slowly go out of date over time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_plate_motion_2008-0...
But I don't know if such a moved building necessarily keeps its address.
In Sweden, the whole city of Kiruna (complete with church, town hall, schools, shops and a station) is moved two miles to the east.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/and-you-thoug...
- Outside the US and Europe things tend to get really wacky with geography and geospatial data. Many GIS products are licensed per country for this very reason.
- In the US, zip codes are the most terrible type of geography to use for any meaningful analysis, as they are constantly changing and do not actually have defined borders. Zip codes are basically just labels that get appended to street segments.
- If you look in the back of the ~200 page pdf that comes with most digital geographic data, you will find an appendix. 99% of the appendix is a section typically called "disputed territories", and 99% of the disputed territories are China claiming to own another nation. I never realized quite the extent of the megalomania until I read a few of those.
Better example could perhaps be The Hague (Den Haag or 's- Gravenhage in dutch). It also an example for the first and third one (dutch doesn't use 's (or des) nor den anymore)
edit: oh and it's also the seat of the government but not the capital
I don't think so, the official name is 's-Gravenhage, even though many people and official organizations use Den Haag.
- A country means the same thing as a nation-state (for a counterexample, see the UK)
An Americanism I've often encountered in postal address forms:
- Every country has something equivalent to "states" and your "state" is a mandatory part of an address
More info for those that asked: http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0703/geoid1of3.html
USPS didn't do home mail delivery, so the PO Box we kept was fine for them, but a lot of folks insist on a "physical address" and didn't like "House 313 behind the School". 911 has changed this in rural communities by giving a street address that means something to the police & fire, but means little to the people living there.
Not true. ÿ is very simple to type on a french keyboard, it's like ë (eg Noël), with a different letter.
counterexample - military mail (APO/FPO)
- Any location within a US state will also be within a county.
Virginia treats incorporated cities as county-level entities which are not part of any county. It looks like Baltimore, MD is the only example of this outside Virginia, and so it's not encountered often.
When people ask about county, giving the independent city is generally the "correct" answer, but sometimes it leads to confusion. I remember having to explain to a loan officer, who you'd think would be up on the details of the states they operate in, that my "county" was in fact "Alexandria City" and there wasn't any other sort of answer they could get.
Just recently, I recall checking out some project linked here on HN which needed to know what county I lived in. I currently live in Fairfax County in a zip code that also includes the City of Fairfax. After giving it my zip code, it then gave me two choices for county: "Fairfax" and "Fairfax".
Every so often we'd get a delivery driver with a poor sense of direction, and he'd give the package to the people on the other side of the post office instead. Aside from that, it worked great.