[pmwiki-users] attachlist syntax or attach rendering

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Jul 29 16:09:34 CDT 2005


On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 04:50:31PM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> >However, one concern I have (and the reason I haven't implemented
> >this yet) is the confusion that wikiadmins are likely to experience
> >from having a system that uses wildcards and regular expressions --
> >knowing the differences between the two, and when to use a wildcard
> >versus a regular expression.
> >
> >Any thoughts...?
> 
> Speaking as a member of the great unwashed masses who know very close to 
> nothing about regular expressions, wildcards make perfect sense. Even 
> Windoze users know about them if they have ever had the pleasure of typing 
> "del *.*" at the command line prompt or if they have noted the "*.*" 
> wildcard string that appears in some file open dialogs even under XP.
> 
> As Chris Cox mentioned in his post, for directory related things, wildcards 
> seem the natural choice.
> 
> By contrast, REs are so arcane I have no difficulty deciding when to use 
> them - almost never! ;-)

Well, I know that wildcards are easier than RE's... but that really
isn't the focus of my concern.

A wikiadmin who does anything in the way of customizing searches or
markup in PmWiki is going to be exposed to regular expressions --
there's just not much avoiding it.  My concern is more aimed
at what impact the introduction of a wildcard syntax into the
distribution might have on admins -- is it going to cause more
confusion and headache than it's worth?  By adding wildcards,
a wikiadmin has to know when PmWiki is expecting a wildcard
versus when it's expecting a regular expression (especially in
config files and the like).  I'm particularly thinking of
things such as $SearchPatterns that control the set of pages
being looked for...

Ultimately I just know that if there's two different-but-similar 
syntaxes for something, it invites a heck of a lot of confusion 
about when to use which syntax.  So something about the 
wildcards makes me uneasy here...

Anyway, I may just need more time to think about it.

Pm




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list