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

[Erik Sigra <freeciv@xxxxxxx>]

Gaute B Strokkenes wrote:
> 
> 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.

Man, now I think it is you who are splitting thoose hairs! How hard can it be 
for thoose poor nation homebrewers to write "Male" instead of "male"? They 
would have to hold down shift while they type 'M' or something! (They just have 
to keep holding it down a little longer since they already held it down to 
write the '"'.) At least my head doesn't itch because of that (although I don't 
know about norwegian(*) heads (oops, no offense ment :-)). But like I said 
before, it could be changed to always be "male" if head-scratching is such a 
big problem.

(*)Note for non-scandinavians: Swedes and Norwegians usually make jokes about 
each other like for example Ostfriesen and Germans. So we are not really hating 
each other if someone thought so.

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

Not? I think this discussion is getting long enough already. Maybe we should go 
private with this before the others start asking questions like "Will thoose 
darn nitpicking scandinavians ever stop?" if no one objects?


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

Sure. Just tell me how long you want them!

> 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!!

LOL :-) I think I will keep making you reply until I have seen all of thoose 
funny random quotations. :-)