On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Robert Bradshaw
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Dec 8, 2009, at 4:49 AM, Stan Schymanski wrote:
>
>> Robert Bradshaw wrote:
>> [SNIP]
>>> Making notebook IDs that are not simply consecutive
>>> integers would solve nearly all of your issues above, and I think a
>>> lot of people (myself included) would appreciate that. Either short
>>> names or globally unique identifiers (or some combination of both)
>>> would be a step forward.
>>>
>>>
>> I remember an earlier discussion of this, which I think concluded that
>> we want to keep the worksheet names independent of file system naming
>> conventions.
>
> Yes. Ideally they could be stored in a database as well as stored on a
> filesystem. It would be nice if it were easy to query, even from
> outside a running notebook session.
>
>> I would also be in favour of unique, static directory names
>> that show up in the front end. The user could still add more
>> descriptive
>> names in addition to the directory names, but it would be nice if we
>> could refer to other worksheets by their names. The next step would
>> be
>> to create scripts that check any cross-references if a worksheet is
>> re-named; probably not an easy task (?). And if we are at that, I
>> would
>> really appreciate a way of referring to particular cells in a
>> worksheet
>> by their labels (e.g. \ref{ws:mass_balance1, cell:dMdt}). Maybe a
>> script
>> that goes through a whole notebook and checks cross-references in all
>> work sheets could then also convert such labels to consecutive
>> numbers,
>> similarly to LaTex (?).
>
> If worksheet IDs under the hood are globally unique random numbers,
> and a concordance of name -> ids are kept, one wouldn't have to worry
> about doing a grand find-and-replace if a name changed.
That's because you would be disallowing name changes.
Making users refer to a random id number whenever they want to refer
to or reference a given worksheet is kind of mean and also makes
autogeneration of collections of worksheets by other programs more
difficult. It would be like forcing latex users to *remember* funny
random id's instead of using \ref{sec:intro}, which is much easier.
There will be unique id's, just as there are now, but that should be
something the user doesn't have to worry about.
William
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