User talk:Rfc1394

G'day RFC1394,
Not sure why you created a page (identifier to which nothing links) and then redirected it to Identifiers?
-- Trev (talk) 00:00, 6 January 2020 (CET)

I deleted that page. --Bart (talk) 00:24, 6 January 2020 (CET)

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Hi Rfc1394,
I removed some of your remarks on Howto Use TOpenDialog‎ and Howto Use TSaveDialog‎.
The dialog has some options to warn you if a file already exists and can warn you for overwriting an existing one.
Please read the documentation, or study the code before writing such things to the wiki.
--Bart (talk) 14:45, 24 December 2017 (CET)

Syntaxhighlight templates

You have recently created (and started using) Template: HL/HLD and Template: TT. Honestly, it’s not a good idea to simply create templates that’re meant for global use, which will be used millions of times. Will you please undo the respective changes?
Also, you can’t just make a global substitution: E. g. in Operator the {{HL|{$mode ISO}}} is rendered as {$mode ISO}.
I see your templates’ good intentions, but unfortunately it (the implementation) is ill-informed. Thanks for your consideration.
Kai Burghardt (talk) 14:59, 17 October 2020 (CEST)

Hi, this is Paul Robinson, User Rfc1394, responding to your comment on my talk page.

I'll explain what I am doing, why I understand your concerns, how your comment allowed me to understand a problem in what I was doing (and how to fix it), and more importantly why I am doing this. I know what I am saying here is a bit long, but I want you to be able to see the big picture.

I have been a longtime user of both the Pascal language and Free Pascal, going back more than 40 and 20 years, respectively. I will be 60 years old next month and have been progarmming since I was 16. I found one of the bugs - and the exact line in the code - in the DOS installer for Free Pascal back before there was a 32-bit windows version. As such I want to see the available documentation kept up to date and improved as needed. Currently, to mark an inline piece of code as being in Pascal, one has to either use the Wiki add-on <syntaxhighlight> or do what I did, examine the page source and determine what HTML this translates into. Now, for multi-line examples this is reasonable as the <syntaxhighlight> add-in does a lot of work. But, for small items, like one or a few characters the coding on the page can be so heavy the page becomes unreadable. My endeavor was to make the underlying wiki pages more readable so changes are easy to do. If the page is a huge mess of coding, people might decide it's too much trouble and stay away. Thus losing a potentially valuable resource from someone who might have been able to improve things.

I am also a veteran Wikipedia editor with over 11,000 edits on over 6,000 pages. I have even been granted the special "template editor" privilege to be permitted to edit protected templates on Wikipedia. I have written very complicated templates and am relatively familiar with how they work. One big reason for using templates is to make things easier to read, or to use.

Consider the following sentence:

The three comparison operators are < = > which can also be combined as <=, >=, <> and ><, depending on what is to be compared.

If we want that to appear as Pascal format, so it looks like this:

The three comparison operators are < = > which can also be combined as <=, >=, <> and ><, depending on what is to be compared.

Now, this is how it would have to be done originally:

The three comparison operators are < = > which can also be combined as <=, >=, <> and ><, depending on what is to be compared.

Notice these look identical. But, internally, this is what the first one looks like:

: The three comparison operators are {{HL|1=< = >}} which can also be combined as {{HL|1=<=}}, {{HL|1=>=}}, {{HL|<>}} and {{HL|><}}, depending on what is to be compared.

And this is what the second one looks like:

: The three comparison operators are <syntaxhighlight lang="pascal" enclose="none">< = ></syntaxhighlight> which can also be combined as <syntaxhighlight lang="pascal" inline><=</syntaxhighlight>, <syntaxhighlight lang="pascal" enclose="none">>=</syntaxhighlight>, <syntaxhighlight lang="pascal" enclose="none"><></syntaxhighlight> and <syntaxhighlight lang="pascal" enclose="none">><</syntaxhighlight>, depending on what is to be compared.

Which of these would you want to have to edit?

If you had looked at the templates for Template:HL, Template HLD or Template:HLC I have a note explaining that they replace the <syntaxhighlight lang="pascal" enclose="none">, <syntaxhighlight lang="delphi" enclose="none"> and <syntaxhighlight lang="C" enclose="none"> constructs, respectively. But, whoever wrote the <syntaxhighlight> add-in, did not consider it might be used inside a template and thus it does not support template parameters. This is why my template generates the direct HTML instead of using the <syntaxhighlight> add-in.

Now, as for the erroneous display of {$mode ISO} as {$mode ISO} I admit, was a (small) mistake on my part. I have vision problems, and normally work in High Contrast Mode (Windows LEFT ALT-SHIFT-PRINT SCREEN key), and I sometimes miss small details. I didn't see it miss-rendering the item, because, frankly, I rarely have handled text containing } and had I seen it I would have fixed it. The correct fix is to use {{HL|{$mode ISO}|}} using an extra | after the parameter to signify the end of the parameter before the close of the template. I will try to fix it if I can find the page where it was. Frankly, I see the use of the template as easier to use and easier to read than either of <syntaxhighlight lang="pascal" enclose="none"> or <syntaxhighlight lang="pascal" inline> (both of which do the same thing). I think what I will do is try to post a bug report to Wikimedia for the <syntaxhighlight> addin to inform the Wikimedia people and perhaps the developer that their <syntaxhighlight> add-in does not handle template parameters correctly (or at all).

The whole idea here is to get the computer to do the hard work of formatting so people can do their creative work. I really don't see why using the long form as I have shown above makes things better or easier than the macro does, despite the two faults it has (the other fault I discovered was you can't have an = in a parameter to the template either, you have to code 1= before a parameter containing an = sign.

Still, if you can think of a good reason why using the longer and more complex <syntaxhighlight> code mode over a simple and shorter {{HL| template makes more sense, please feel free to explain. What I do doesn't stop someone from using the old method, any more than having { stops someone from using (* for a Pascal comment.

I don't see where a couple of minor and correctable errors - especially since I know about them - detract from (what I see as) the vast improvement in readability and maintainability with this new method. I would prefer to be able to use the wiki code method over HTML inside of the template but until it supports template parameters I have to use that method. But I appreciate your concerns.

Thank you for reading,
Paul
Rfc1394 (talk) 00:07, 19 October 2020 (CEST)

OK, I just checked out the EWP, and there Template: Code has been used merely 36k times.

OK, your usage case – templates – may be justified, but I still prefer GeSHi’s color coding over the plain gray every word now has (using your templates).

While typing out <syntaxhighlight …> is indeed tedious, not every article is strewn with that, such as Operator is. Introducing yet another template always increases complexity, i. e. yet another layer potentially repelling contributors. I know from my Wikipedia editing experience I sometimes folded, because of templates. [To be fair, Lua templates having dozens of parameters, so HD is harmless.]

Yet still, I really prefer to KISS. It’s already terrible we’re using those language bar templates just to keep uniform categorization among different language versions of one article.

Kai Burghardt (talk) 11:11, 27 October 2020 (CET)

loop instruction

You’ve recently created the article loop instruction. Did you know, we already have an article on loops? Maybe you would you like to merge the contents there, without creating redundancies to other articles? Moreover, the article name loop instruction is quite misleading: The article does not deal with the assembly instruction loop, but (Pascal) statements. Kai Burghardt (talk) 18:48, 19 November 2020 (CET)