Re: Enumerated string comparisons

[Benjamin Franksen <benjamin.franksen@helmholtz-berlin.de>]

Am Mittwoch, 9. Oktober 2013, 14:17:36 schrieb Michael Davidsaver:
> On 10/09/2013 11:17 AM, Benjamin Franksen wrote:
> > Am Mittwoch, 9. Oktober 2013, 16:38:53 schrieb Johnson, Andrew N.:
> >> Question for core developers: Should we modify the Enum string
> >> parser
> >> to try using case-independent or other fuzzy string comparisons if
> >> a
> >> string value doesn't match using the case-dependent comparison or
> >> after trying to convert the string to an integer? We could make the
> >> IOC dwim ("do what I mean", a Perl term) in the case below, but the
> >> result is a less precise database so I'm not sure if this is a good
> >> idea or not and how far we should take it.
> > 
> > I share your reservations about making the parser more dwim. My main
> > objective is that it makes the specification more complex.
> 
> Me too.  It is occasionally annoying, but I think better in the long
> term, to have strict matching.

I would vote for strict matching *if* we had an established convention 
how to name choices. Unfortunately this is not the case and for reasons 
of tradition and compatibility it is probably not going to happen.

Therefore I see a case for some very limited sort of dwimming, namely:

(1) Case-insensitive matching.

(2) Identifying underline '_' and space ' '.

Both points listed have a simple, straight-forward specification.

And for both we lack an established convention: some choices are upper 
case, some lower, some mixed; some choices use underline to separate 
words, some use space. This makes the exact spelling of the choice names 
hard to remember.

On the other hand, we might actually chose to establish a convention. My 
favourite candidate would be to use all lower case and space as a word 
separator. That would mean changing lots of menu definitions and now the 
problem becomes one of compatibility. That could be solved by an 
extension of the dbd syntax that allows to define aliases for menu 
choice names.

Cheers
Ben
-- 
"Make it so they have to reboot after every typo." -- Scott Adams

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