On 9/22/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There's no problem with '=', at least not
a new one. If you want to
give a template a parameter containing an = sign, you have to give the
param a name (or number) - exactly the same applies here.
No, because template parameters are in a different namespace from page
names. We (hopefully) ban '=' in template parameters already. We
don't additionally need to ban it in page names, since '|' is already
banned in page names. Likewise there's no need to ban '=' in page
names for this syntax if we ban '::' in page names. You're right that
either way it's not the '=' that matters, it's the thing that
separates the page name from the parameters, in this case '::'.
The problem with page names including :: is much more
serious issue.
You can't introduce a new special character without having some way to
escape it.
In practice, we tend to not bother with escaping, and just ban the
special character outright instead. That's moderately acceptable for
small numbers of characters, but we should reuse those banned
characters as much as possible for new syntactic constructs, if we
really need to make new ones.