On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 05:08:30PM -0400, Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
See my other message: the actual issue is when people *type an example of a regular expression into a wikipage*. While that may not happen much on Wikipedia, remember that Not All Mediawikiae Are Wikipedia, a rule that's pertinent when discussing this category of topic.
It is then an exception, not a rule. Suppose you have a programming language X that uses some of the same markup wiki uses and you want to list some example source code in that language, should you change the wiki markup not to create conflict or just quote the source code? I guess the latter, so why things should be different for regular expressions?
Well, as the other poster notes: *URL's*. The issue is twofold: which item is more newly defined, and which one is more common.
There might be good reasons for not using /slashes/, I just think this was not one of them. :)
URLs are definitely a better example, but as Mr Cable notes, there are *lots* of programming wikis; overloading /RE/ is about as bad as overloading /U/R/L.
And since we *can* avoid it, we pretty much *must* avoid it.
Cheers, -- jra