[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [PATCH] Names in rulesets. (PR#559)

[Gaute B Strokkenes <gs234@xxxxxxxxx>]

Erik Sigra <freeciv@xxxxxxx> writes:

> Gaute B Strokkenes wrote:
> > 
> > Erik Sigra <freeciv@xxxxxxx> writes:
> > 
> > > Gaute B Strokkenes wrote:
> 
> > > In princlple I like things that force correctness.
> > 
> > Really?  Did you ever hear about "bondage and discipline" languages?
> 
> I had a 5-week programming course in the spring. We used Ada95. That
> is the best and friendliest language I have ever tested. And it is
> the only language I have ever recieved academic training in.

Right.  I've never programmed in Ada myself, in fact I have no idea
what it looks like.

> > > What would case variations be good for?
> > 
> > Why not?  So that you can write "male" instead of "Male", for
> > instance.  There are a number of places where case sensitivity _is_
> > appropriate, mostly because it would confuse gettext(), but I don't
> > think this is one of them.
> 
> If we for some reason think that "male" is better than "Male" we
> should use it everywhere and not let chaos take over. Allowing
> random case increases entropy. Then the comression will be less
> effective. I made a little test: I took the first 10 nations
> (american to brazilian) and copied them to two directories. Let's
> call them nation/ and nATioN/. In nATioN, I randomized the case of
> the letters in the leader sexes. Then I tared the files in each
> directory. Both tar-files had the same size of course. Then I
> bzipped the tar files. nation/nations.tar.bz2 became 3966B
> large. nATioN/nATioNs.tar.bz2 became 4042B large. So I lost 76B only
> because of this very little change. The difference might become even
> bigger if it was made truly random. 76B is not much but it would add
> up if we allowed sloppiness in more places in the
> distribution. (Besides, most people think entropy is ugly.)

Man, but this argument is getting _way_ out of line.  You're really
splitting hairs here.  First of all, allowing mixed case is not an
invitation for people to write things like "nAtIOn" instead of nation,
anymore than the present liberal interpretation of whitespace is an
invitation to replace spaces with tabs at random.  It's not going to
happen, end of story.  The worst thing you would realistically ever
see would be "male" in some places and "Male" in others.

> The increased size might be a little disadvantage but the advantage
> of being able to write "male" instead of "Male" in some places seems
> even litteler.

I think it's a good thing because it makes it just a tiny bit easier
to come up with your own homebrewed nation rulesets.  This sort of
thing has caused a lot of head-scratching over the years.

> That implies the conclution that case variations are no good.

I think that your conclusion is that the concurrent use of various
case-variations of "male" and / or "female" is bad for the general
public, and that they should be prohibited and protected from their
use.  My conclusion is that it makes no difference whatsoever, and
that they should be allowed to do what they want to.

Not that I actually care enough to really bother getting into a long
discussion about this.

BTW, please fix your line lengths.  All of your paragraphs seem to
appear on one long line all by themselves.

-- 
Big Gaute (not to be confused with LG)
Kids, the seven basic food groups are GUM, PUFF PASTRY, PIZZA,
 PESTICIDES, ANTIBIOTICS, NUTRA-SWEET and MILK DUDS!!