@article{singh_singh_2000, title={Deconstructing the "Any" key}, volume={43}, ISSN={["0001-0782"]}, url={https://publons.com/publon/21294515/}, DOI={10.1145/332051.332081}, abstractNote={A popular techies' tale goes as follows. A user calls customer support with a problem: " The program says 'press any key to continue' but I can't find the any key on the keyboard. " Stupid user. We suppose this story is apoc-ryphal. Most people have a reasonable understanding of language even if they aren't familiar with computers. But we're not surprised if some user has had this very difficulty figuring out the " any " key. Our point is that although an actual user may or may not be as ill-informed as the apocryphal one, virtually all real programmers are insensitive. And we don't mean personal insensitivity. We mean technical insensitivity, the kind that results from viewing a problem solely from one's own perspective. We imagine the programmer writing the instructions to press any key wants to delay processing until the user has acknowledged reading some message. (This is called a dialogue, although it doesn't allow much in the way of conversation.) The programmer writes a simple program to achieve this effect—let's call this desired behavior " acknowledged continuation. " This program might look something like the following in pseudo code: display(" press any key to continue "); get_character() This is a nice program and gives every indication of being reliable. The program displays a message and awaits an input from the user. As soon as an input, any input, arrives, the program can continue. When the user sees the message " press any key to continue, " he or she (usually) has a readily available keyboard. By definition, one would expect, a keyboard is something with keys. But not all keys are alike. Experienced users know to press a key that works, such as the space bar or the enter key. However , this is more a matter of a user having been trained through past experience to press the right keys than a matter of the specification itself being clear. For instance, some of the keys have no effect. Press the shift or control key and nothing happens. Press the caps lock key and it may affect what you type later, but the program still doesn't budge. On some computers, when the alt key is pressed, something weird may happen. Ditto with the function keys. Press the power on-off key, which exists on some keyboards, and the results may …}, number={4}, journal={COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM}, author={Singh, MP and Singh, M}, year={2000}, month={Apr}, pages={107–108} } @article{singh_1998, title={On the semantics of the perfective aspect}, volume={6}, number={2}, journal={Natural Language Semantics}, author={Singh, M.}, year={1998}, pages={171–199} }