Talk:Leaning toothpick syndrome
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Untitled
editI am not really a computer programmer so I can't tell what that pear script is supposed to say. Can an expert include what the code outputs as so it is obvious the problems with Leaning toothpick syndrome. Ed Dehm 04:46, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
- Perl, not pear. ;) Anyway, it is "supposed" to say any of the 4 examples given. Alone they are not valid lines of perl, they are just an example of a regular expression (regex). The normal character used to delimit a regex in perl is / so if I was looking for "abcd" the expression would be m/abcd/ but if I wanted to look for "a/b/c/d" the regex would be m/a\/b\/c\/d/ because a \ is needed as an escape character to tell perl that the / it is about to see isn't the end of search; that begins to look like a bunch of leaning toothpicks. So perl lets you use other characters to delimit the search, as shown in the last three examples. My example would become m{a/b/c/d} which is not only prettier but much easier for another programmer to see what I am up to. — RevRagnarok Talk Contrib 12:11, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
Notability
editThe only reference is a huge article which only uses the term once (in brackets). Is this term even used outside that one document? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.123.192.77 (talk) 16:53, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
- I was wondering about tht as well. Is this often used in programing?Millertime246 (talk) 17:00, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
- It comes up reasonably often in Perl and shell programming, but I suspect not as often outside of those cultures. It does come up enough that (1) it was redlinked in more than one place, once upon a time and (2) I added the article so I'd be able to point people to something. A merge into String literal or Escape character might be appropriate, although precisely how that might be handled without disrupting that article too much is not clear, since it's hard to explain LTS without examples. "What is LTS?" is probably a question that Wikipedia ought to be able to answer somehow, so a simple deletion would not be ideal. Ccreitz (talk) 21:49, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
- Yes, in the official perl regular expression tutorial ("perlretut"), it specifically mentions leaning toothpick syndrome, and that's how I came here. Lakshwadeep (talk) 19:27, 17 June 2013 (UTC)
- I don't think the exact term is used a lot outside perl, but it is an extremely common phenomenon in many programming languages and environments, and LTS is the only term that I know of for this situation. Every programmer has felt the pain and would immediately resonate with the term and why it was created. Fool4jesus (talk) 15:16, 11 June 2019 (UTC)
- It comes up reasonably often in Perl and shell programming, but I suspect not as often outside of those cultures. It does come up enough that (1) it was redlinked in more than one place, once upon a time and (2) I added the article so I'd be able to point people to something. A merge into String literal or Escape character might be appropriate, although precisely how that might be handled without disrupting that article too much is not clear, since it's hard to explain LTS without examples. "What is LTS?" is probably a question that Wikipedia ought to be able to answer somehow, so a simple deletion would not be ideal. Ccreitz (talk) 21:49, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
MediaWiki
editShouldn't we add MediaWiki templates as well? I mean the decision to introduce Lua modules was partly because template developers tried to get out of the {{{name1|{{{name2|{{{name3|default}}}}}}}}} nightmare by using meta templates. The "MediaWiki language" seem to be an internal issue to the editors of this article but since the software is now the most widespread wiki solution so that it's even supported by Pandoc, I think the necessary encyclopedic relevance is given. --Uncopy (talk) 22:34, 1 July 2021 (UTC)