Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> 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.
Not in csh. The $ /token/ is an /unary operator/ that means "contents".
> 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.
>
[[Sigil (computer programming)]] is/are a different concept from what we
learned in compiler class 30 years ago. According to the article, sigils
and twigils are terms that weren't coined until 1999 and later.
And BASIC only "sort of" has sigils; merely all strings end with $.
Actually, in an early implementation, all strings were a single character
followed by a $, so the symbol table could be populated with all 26
possibilities in advance....
> 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.
>
Using sigils for wikitext would *DE*crease readability, as any poor soul
that had to debug Perl can attest.
{{{...}}} works, is easily distinguished from normal text, and BBedit
does a fine job keeping the braces balanced. I'm sure other editors, too.
Anything else should wait for a general scripting language, as we've been
talking about in a different thread. You're not suggesting Perl 6?
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