On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 04:16:13PM -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 06:53:13PM +0100, Timwi 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.
I don't believe it's a fallacious arguemnt. Let me cast it for you slightly differently:
Choices for inline text markup coding should be made so as to collide with the least possible number of already extant uses of that set of punctuation.
That's why [[ ]], '' '', and ''' ''' are pretty good choices, while the leading space for indention, slightly less so.
While *bold* would be contextual, since <BOL>* is already in use for list items, _italics_ would not, and doesn't collide with anything.
/italics/, though, would, probably unexpectedly, collide with the writing of Regexes, and there's no good way to disambiguate from context (as there is with *bold face marking*).
Thanks. That (and some of your other commentary) clarifies where I was heading, and I wasn't coming up with a useful way to phrase it. I'm glad someone else did.
Additionally, my statements weren't "fallacious" because they didn't purport to be some kind of valid argument that they were not. One might claim that my premises were wrong or inapplicable, but I don't think "invalid" or "fallacious" in any way applied to my statements.
Besides, I only started this by saying something like "I'd rather we didn't do it that way." I wasn't trying to mandate policy or call anyone names, so the implicit vitriol with which my perspective seems to have been met is a mite bewildering to me.