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
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?