I think the best example of using strings over ints is DNS. How many people know IP address of their favorite website? Using a numeric based name space is great for machines, but in order for the web to be usable, we had to create DNS.
I suspect the same logic would apply here. If we are going to have a usable api, we should use a string. Mike O. With that in mind, you would have to do a lot to convince me that int's were a better solution for an API. On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Jeff Eaton <[email protected]> wrote: > On May 21, 2009, at 11:50 AM, Chris Johnson wrote: > > After all, we wouldn't want developers to have actually document >> anything they write. ;-) >> > > Well... documentation is needed in either case. But with ints, collisions > are absolutely inevitable. I ran into this with VotingAPI early on -- I had > a const for 'vote_type', and it had 3 values out of the box. Pretty quickly, > two other modules both defined fourth value types. suddenly, those modules > couldn't co-exist with each other. > > There's nothing in *my* documentation that could have solved that, other > than a pointer to a wiki page where everyone claimed ints. >
