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When they can enter any character, what do you tell them?
Subject:When they can enter any character, what do you tell them? From:"Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 31 Aug 2001 10:07:13 -0400
David Castro wonders: <<If you are writing documentation for the syntax
users have to enter to use a feature, and they can separate values provided
in a field with anything they choose...or not separate them at all, do you
tell them that? Or do you tell them to use a particular character to
separate the values, just to reduce the chance of confusion?>>
I've done this sort of thing once or twice in the past, and I always wrote
something like the following: "Although you can separate the parameters with
any character, or not separate them at all, we recommend separating them
with a comma to make it easier to read the individual parameters and spot
errors." Whether you should actually recommend using a comma depends on what
the language most commonly uses for separators in other types of code; this
makes the writing of the code more visually and stylistically consistent,
and lets the programmers leverage their familiarity with existing code style
to master this new concept.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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