On 4/27/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 02:30:09PM -0400, Pedro de Medeiros wrote:
On 4/27/06, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
This thread has gotten so dense that I can no longer discern what the topic is, much less who's on which side. If anyone sees fit to continue it, I suggest they start by enumerating those two things.
Not sure what you mean by 'dense'. My "side" of the thread is just that I get agitated at illogical/fallacious arguments like "let's not use slashes for italics -- they look like regular expressions." That's all.
According to the principle of least astonishment, if someone types something between /slashes/ in a wiki document, he doesn't expect it to turn into regular expressions to do some unobvious pattern matching when "commit" is pressed. So I agree with you.
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?
There might be good reasons for not using /slashes/, I just think this was not one of them. :)
Cheers. -- Pedro de Medeiros - Computer Science - University of BrasÃlia Email: pedro.medeiros@gmail.com - Home Page: http://www.nonseq.net Linux User No.: 234250 - ICQ: 2878740 - Jabber: medeiros@jabber.org