On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 8:56 PM, William Allen Simpson<[email protected]> wrote: > Not sure, as I've been using Unix since late 1977, so my fingers mostly > remember csh. The $ is something like "contents of variable".
It's a way to distinguish variables from ordinary text. Shell scripts, like wikitext, don't require string delimiters, so you can't just make unadorned strings of letters represent variables. Other ad hoc macro languages, like mIRC script, also tend to use some kind of sigil for this reason. Perl might have come up with the idea of using sigils to distinguish different types of variables, but that's not the only reason they're useful. According to Wikipedia, BASIC may have used sigils for that purpose before anyone else used them, though: string variables use $, numeric variables don't. And that's well before Unix, apparently, let alone sh or Perl. Using sigils for wikitext would increase readability and would serve a perfectly useful purpose, while being familiar to many users. But you couldn't introduce it on old pages, they'd have to opt in somehow. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
