[OT] Face value of stamps and the costs of posting

[Anita]

That would make a change ;)

[Anita]

I think that would be difficult to do

[Graeme Wall]

Obviously we have signally failed to impress you.

[EricP]

Sorry, but I'm just trying to keep the line open and not get clogged down with ballast.

[Anita]

Looks that way !

[Helen Deborah Vecht]

"Linz" typed

And me and coj and Guy and others...

[bof]

In message , Anita writes

Ahh, good news, you've managed to fix your newsreader, what was causing it to drop replies?

[JAF]

Remember your station. Master your baser urges, and we may yet. . .

[bof]

In message , Graeme Wall writes

That's the ticket, a nice appraisal.

[Charles Ellson]

Unfortunately, you haven't:

[Patrick Hardlentil]

And August West was like:

Sixties, wun tit? There weren't any computers then; it was all steam engines and adding machines.

Interesting (or perhaps not) that the PO's address finder lets you type in (most) postcodes without spaces. Presumably it would barf if you did type an ambiguous code, but cases like the one Alistair describes must be quite rare.

[Bob Eager]

There is no ambiguous case. The last grouping always starts with a digit, and is three characters in length. So, for ABCDEFG:

last part is always EFG, and E must be a digit first part is always the 'alpha' part (one or two letters) and the rest must be digits.

[Peter Masson]

"Bob Eager" wrote

The outward part may be 2, 3 or 4 characters, consisting of one or two letters followed by one or two numerals. However, after one numeral there may be a further letter, e.g. EC2V 6DZ, or EC2Y 5AQ. There are also one or two special postcodes which do not follow the normal rules. I am not sure whether GIR 0AA is still recognized, but SAN TA1 certainly is (though normally only in the run up to Christmas).

Peter

[Detritus]

On Fri, 09 Jun 2006 20:38:31 GMT, Bob Eager commented

True.

Not true, counter examples are

W1A 1AA, G1R 0AA

[Guy King]

The message from Patrick Hardlentil contains these words:

It was done because it was thought that people would find it easier to remember an alphanumeric sequence than a five or six digit number. Silly really, as people remember their phone numbers all the time and other countries manage fine.

There is another coding system, the name of which escapes me at the moment, but it's a five digit thing used by businesses for certain mail discounts. Mailsort, that's it!

[Guy King]

The message from "Bob Eager" contains these words:

See

[Bob Eager]

Good point. Just take the first part of the algorithm then!

[Bob Eager]

doesn't help.

[Owain]

If they'd used numbers I suppose there would have been a problem with people confusing phone numbers and postodes and sending mail to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, New Scotland Yard, London WHI1212.

If this was before all-figure numbering it would have been even more confusing as several different director areas would have had similar exchange names such as CENtral.

Owain

[Patrick Hardlentil]

And "Bob Eager" was like:

Ah, quite right; I wasn't paying attention there. So, the space is never truly needed for parsing.

This has been more interesting than I'd have thought possible. Hurrah for x-posts!