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by WindyLakeReturn 1986 days ago
I had a similar quiz. I never really liked them because it always bothered me why I was expected to follow the last instruction first, regardless of what it said. Even if it said to ignore the previous instructions, I would only be following it once I reached it, which would mean all other instructions had been followed. Nothing in the initial rules that said to read all instructions gave any indication that one should pick and choose which instructions to follow or that you should do them in reverse order.

Perhaps this was the moment when I first started the path to being a programmer.

2 comments

> I never really liked them because it always bothered me why I was expected to follow the last instruction first, regardless of what it said.

Well then you should be bothered by lots of legal documents/terms of service, many of which say...

"blah blah blah. if you live in california you have specific rights"

A friend told me of a lawyer he knew that would cross out the binding arbitration clause in all legal documents he signed. In california you have the right to opt-out of binding arbitration.

So the last bit of many documents frequently nullifies other things above.

> I never really liked them because it always bothered me why I was expected to follow the last instruction first, regardless of what it said.

I had a similar one, in fairness it started with something along the lines of: "read these instructions completely before you start".

Yes, but you still start with the first instruction.

It is like a function that changes behavior after the first time in executes. The first execution will still do what it says. You have to explicitly call out that you want the last step that modifies the previous steps to be ran first.

It is like when I help someone learning to code and they question why their statement on line 30 doesn't change what is happening on line 15.