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Retrocomputing

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    This was the answer I would have given - editing. Even though I actually preferred papertape because it had a reasonable character set on the machine I used, you have to admit that "replace one line" is much easier on a deck of cards. Commented Apr 11, 2021 at 0:30
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    I dropped more than one deck, but that was never an issue at all. Cards were numbered. And cards could be feed in any order to the compiler, as it would process them in line number sequence. Well, at least since the early 1960s when there was enough RAM (and later Disk) to do so. It was the most basic way to change a program. Noone had to search or a line in a stack to replace it. Just put new cards with the same line numbers at the end of the stack and feed it in. Heck, BASIC worked many years later the very same way. Commented Apr 11, 2021 at 2:29
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    Correcting a simple spelling mistake was easy on cards, put the card with the error and a blank card in the card punch station DUP up to the error, punch the correct word, DUP the rest of the text. On paper tape it was not that easy. Commented Apr 11, 2021 at 17:43
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    xcellent answer and wonderful tidbits. I want more! But another advantage is for ex the use of punched cards of different colors by feynman, who basically invented pipelining, during 1943 at ghe lahnaytan project. This is surely more difficult to achieve with printed paper Commented Apr 11, 2021 at 18:12
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    I was going to a local community college to be a card walloper 40 years ago, and we used punch cards. We'd draw a diagonal line across the edge of a deck to make it easier to sort if they were dropped. OTOH, we rarely had decks bigger than 100 cards for our toy COBOL programs. Commented Apr 11, 2021 at 18:34