Difference between revisions of "User talk:BryanDerksen"

Revision as of 20:06, 27 July 2009

Function article conventions

Moved to Template talk:dafunction

Collisions and Disambiguation

Your change to the Vector page and categorisation of Bool as a Data type started me thinking about how to best handle these.

Putting information for both Vector and vector on the same page would be very confusing especially if GeSHi is configured to create links for functions and data types (which is what I've set it up to do). Which ever way we do it half of the time a user will be taken to what initially appears to be the wrong page which will be frustrating for the user. Moreover since there are other such collisions: Effect vs effect; Event vs event; and Location vs location a simple and consistent solution is desirable.

Similarly while Bool itself doesn't present any problem, unless people try to use it in dascript, there will be collisions with the other 2da data types: int, float, string, etc. Again if someone is wanting information on 2da we don't want them having to wade through the dascript information first.

Consequently suggestion would be to leave the functions undecorated but add a suffix to the data types to differentiate them from the functions and from each other. I've seen this on wikipedia where you get Iron Maiden, Iron Maiden (album) and Iron Maiden (song). In this case I would suggest adding "(dascript type)" or "(data type)" and "(2da type)" as appropriate.

This suffix would be supported in the GeSHi config file so for the most part it would be invisible to the user. Only when they were searching specifically for a Vector or vector would they actually become aware of what was going on.

What do you think? --Sunjammer 18:44, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

I like it, and was thinking something similar. However, I wonder if perhaps the data type should get the unadorned title rather than the function, since they're going to be linked to far more frequently - they're linked to from the variable table templates and the 2da templates, for example, and I expect that in ordinary written prose a link "vector" is more likely to be aimed at the data type than the constructor function. Ultimately it's not that big a deal which way we pick since we have redirect capabilities in this wiki, and since most of the links will be generated via templates or scripts so they can be easily changed if we end up picking the suboptimal approach. BryanDerksen 19:06, 27 July 2009 (UTC)