From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2006-01-03T00:22:11+09:00
Subject: Re: The "ruby way" to break apart a name?

On 1/2/06, Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > This reminds me of U.S. street addresses.  I (on and off) do work that
> > interfaces with a huge IBM mainframe application. That system has
> > many, many separate fields for street addresses:
> > Number, Direction, Street/Route, Quad, Suffix, Apartment, Line2, etc.
> > I laughed at the way the original engineers had overbuilt. Ha ha ha.
> > ...
> > ...
> > Then I had to write code that took a single address string and split
> > it into its component parts, and I stopped laughing.
> > e.g. 123 N. NESTOR LANE RD. SE #10B
> >
> > Life is complicated, it turns out.
>
> And what's the point of storing that in different fields?
>
One reason is to be able to say things like "Who else lives on the
same street as this person" with a database query.
Another is that the Postal Service has a bunch of funky requirements
that must be met in order to qualify for discount mailing rates.
That being said, these days most big companies subscribe to an address
correction service, and just fix these things on the fly.  Saves a lot
of hassle.