Re: [OS-webwork] xwork suggestions

[Hani Suleiman]

While I agree that it's somewhat unintuitive to have one tag serve these two purposes, I don't think it should be changed. If someone were confused by how it worked, they'd go to the docs that talk about that tag, which would in turn describe both modes, if you will. That 'clarity' can come across as docs, it doesn't require a non-backward compatible code change. To use your OS analogy, how would you like it if a new distro of linux decided that some unix command is unintuitive, and decided to modify its name to better reflect its function, rather than document its existing 'quirks' in a man page?

On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 04:55 PM, boxed wrote:

1) No - the action tag is useful!

Yea, Pat gave a good creative example of why it's good. I find your argument
very enlightening though.

2) Why? The property tag is flexible - not confusing!

Unix has two commands: cd and cat. cd changes directory. cat prints the
contents of a file. Two different commands to do two different things. In
webwork however we have a single command to do both these things and it's
called "property", which btw doesn't really say much. Had an operating
system had a command like that you would not be pleased:

c:\> property foo
c:\foo>property bar.txt
contents of bar.txt
c:\foo>

How logical is that really? Besides the obvious readability aspects of
having a tag for printing a property and another for modifying the stack,
the code for PropertyTag (or rather BasicPropertyTag in the CVS version) is
rather ugly due to the fact that it's really two tags. If nothing else, the
code should reflect this with one PrintPropertyTag and another
PushPropertyTag. Changing BasicPropertyTag to do exactly what it does not
but doing it by extending PrintPropertyTag would be trivial and open up
possibilities for the users. It would also make the code more orthogonal and
readable.

// Anders Hovmöller



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