[LatticeAnimal]

> In New Zealand, non-urgent traffic incidents can be reported by calling *555 from a mobile phone. Alpha characters may also be used in phone numbers, such as in 1-800-Flowers.

Is this true? Do carriers actually accept [a-zA-Z] in their phone numbers? (if so, how are they encoded?). I couldn't find any reference to this elsewhere.

I had assumed that advertisement-numbers like `1-800-Flowers` had to be translated by a person when they entered the number on their phone via their keypad.

[1659447091]

Given the context `Falsehoods Programmers Believe`, I think it is referring to how one validates a number submitted from a form (but maybe there are devices like this?). So, if a flowers company signs up and wants to list their number as 1-800-Flowers they would get a validation error on many sites.

[heelix]

When I'm interviewing, I'll usually start with something simple with an input that is a phone number and the first 'questionable' input I'll hand them is 1-800-FLOWERS and ask how they are handling it. There are a lot of interesting edge cases with phone numbers. None super tricky , but it makes for an interesting first set of how someone thinks