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Re: Poll: personal convenience vs. global improvement of docs



On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 11:18:23AM +0000, Rocco Rutte wrote:
> >For every one existing variable name, there will be exactly one new
> >variable name.  How can you not reliably convert any text document
> >which contains them if that is true?
> 
> I don't know either except for overlapping names where you'd need lots 
> of magic to reliably detect the end of a word with mutt's syntax rules 
> across all awk flavors. 

I don't think so... for overlapping names, just replace the longer
names first.  Then the shorter names won't overlap anymore.

Edge detection should also not be an issue, since the edge of the
variable name MUST be a non-alphanumeric (or else it's a different
variable name).  So you can use the regex \W character for edge
detection.

I don't see a (technical) problem here...  I admit Nicholas's "turing
complete" case is not going to be solved...  But who constructs
.muttrc files this way?  Specifically, who generates the VARIABLE
NAMES programmatically?  Can you find even 10 people who do this?  I'd
be a bit surprised if you could find even one (though not completely
surprised -- mutters tend to be tinkerers; it's almost a requirement
to using mutt in the first place).

A bizarre case that only affects at most a handful of people should
not be considered when deciding whether or not to implement some
improvement (regardless of the size and scope of the change).

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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