Talk:Semordnilap: Difference between revisions

→‎well formed dictionary: added a new section. -- ~~~~
(→‎Ruby Implementation: Don't do that.)
(→‎well formed dictionary: added a new section. -- ~~~~)
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:P.S. If you think the site makes the rules up as it goes along, then in essence you are correct. The users are encouraged and empowered to make RC 'better'. We may struggle at times, but I think Rdm and I made a reasonable request, and made an appropriate change. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 16:47, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
: Nigel, relying on page history that way slams my server. Seriously. Don't do that. MediaWiki only stores the most recent revision verbatim, and diffs from one revision to the next. In order to show a page fifteen revisions old, the server has to apply fourteen diffs. As for the rest of it, I recommend modifying the task to read from a dictionary file. Most non-Windows systems have a words file handy, and a link can be provided to the remainder. --[[User:Short Circuit|Michael Mol]] 17:10, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
 
== well formed dictionary ==
 
Perhaps this may be too general a statement, but I wish the dictionary specified would have capitalized or uppercased words in it (along with some words that have a blank in it, hyphenated words, words that start with an apostrophy [''''til''']) to test the program's metal a wee bit. Having words that may be capitalized would make the dictionary more realistic, or more to the point, make the ''program'' more realistic. This would mean having words like '''god''' ''and'' '''God''' in the dictionary (not to mention '''I'''), and thereby causing programs to handle "duplicate" words, and be sensitive to word case. Also, a true dictionary would have multiple entries for nouns vs. verbs and also homonyms (which would look like two different words), but in a dictionary that only lists unique entries, that might be moot here. Having a list of words, with each section (A,B,C...Z) separated by one or more blank lines would also be common. Having a well formed dictionary just allows programmers to assume too much (such as the words being in some kind of alphabetic order). But assuming everything will be in lowercase just makes for lazy programming (and I'm not saying that in a perjorative way). I don't think programming examples should be written just for the dictionary supplied, and from those assumptions, start taking shortcuts. I wrote the 2nd version of the REXX example to handle all that, with just an extra line of code. I'd also like world peace, ... -- [[User:Gerard Schildberger|Gerard Schildberger]] 22:25, 17 September 2012 (UTC)