
Examples of software forcing to ignore laws or rules - laacz
Are there any other examples of computer programs getting groups or nations to adopt non conformant behaviour because of a tiny inconvenience or a bug?<p>For example, in Latvia we have a grammar rule, which requires a dot after ordinal numerals. For example, &quot;1. vieta&quot; (meaning &quot;1st place&quot;) should be written with a dot and a space before next word (ignoring the fact that it should be non-breaking space).<p>Since Microsoft Word could not spell check Latvian at the time, by default it automatically capitalized first letter of following word, recognizing it as the start of a new sentence.<p>Quick workaround obviously was omitting space after a dot, which went into documents, laws, legal papers then and even now. It became a recommendation without explanation, so it became standard even being against grammar rules.<p>Though Word has long learned checking Latvian and not autocapitalizing in these cases, many people still are writing ordinals without space after the dot.
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tgflynn
I'm aware of one somewhat similar case.

When I learned French (as a non native speaker) I was told that capital
letters are not accented.

Later when I lived in France I found out that while this is common practice,
it is neither universal nor normative and came about because typewriters
typically couldn't produce accented capital letters.

