Talk Pages

If you dislike the idea of a Contributors page we can leave the page behind when doing the rename. Which would then be true for Programming:Ada:Contributing as well.

Or how about Talk:Ada Programming/Contributors lounge and Talk:Ada Programming/Contributing insteed.

You're right, Programming:Ada:Contributing will be counted as a content page while being internal, but at least it is not a talk page. I think we should designate a talk page as the main page for discussing about the wikibook, either Talk:Programming:Ada (future Talk:Ada Programming) or Talk:Programming:Ada:Contributing (future Talk:Ada Programming/Contributing) and open the major discussions always on that page.

Yes, we need a central discussion page. Some days ago I put a proposal at Talk:Programming:Ada:Libraries:Ada but nobody noticed it. I prefer to use Talk:Programming:Ada because the people that see the talk page of the cover will see a lot of movement and not a dead page. And maybe we can have some redirections from other talk pages.

PS: The MediaWiki should have an option to watch every page of the wikibook --surueña 15:36, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Yes, sometimes the discussions may be lost in the discussion pages, but we can also end like in the Spanish Wikipedia where all the discussion is done in the Café, then it grows too fast and the discussions decay before an agreement is reached. A compromise is to discuss the topics in their respective talk pages but announce it in the central discussion page. And you are right, MediaWiki lacks some features that would be very useful for Wikibooks. ManuelGR 16:37, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

Bug reports and feature requests should go to http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org - Aya ^T C 19:46, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

I followed your advice and created several new feature requests. See Wikibooks:Staff_lounge#New_enhancement_request_for_MediaWiki. ManuelGR 00:50, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

I like the idea of announcing discussions in a central talk page (I still propose Talk:Programming:Ada), having the actual conversations in the adecuate talk pages. If we're all agree, we can move the contents of this page to Talk:Programming:Ada:Contributing, archive the current contents of the Talk:Programming:Ada in the subpages Talk:Programming:Ada/2004 and Talk:Programming:Ada/2005H1, and start using that central talk page. But it's better to wait after the new title is chosen and every module is moved to the final domain name. --surueña 09:41, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

Comments and Ada Wiki markup

While editing Computer programming/Design by Contract, I stumbled across a few character combinations in Ada comments, viz

-- {{{1}}},

...

The equal sign is used in templates for the named notation. Apart from replacing with entity references you can solve this by correctly using the named notation for assigning the comment to the only one parameter (by default named 1):

{{Ada/operator|not_equals|1=/=}} is /=

-- ManuelGR 19:29, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I have added corrections accordingly.

BTW, since `[' and `]' are wiki specials, too, the comment function could treat them specially. I'm not sure though whether it should or not. What do you think? gb 04:36, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Note that `[' and `]' are only interpreted by the wiki in the following cases:

[[internal links]] gives internal links
[http://es.wikipedia.org external links] gives external links
[but this one has no effect] because it doesn't start with http
]] these pairs are not enclosing nothing [[ so they aren't interpreted.

Given that the wiki syntax will be seldom used to represent anything else I think it isn't very needed to take it into account, but if you do so, you would have to enclose with nowiki tags:

<nowiki>[</nowiki>

-- ManuelGR 13:38, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Some escaping conflicts remain, as in the following example, but o.K., these will be easy to resolve by hand, I think. I wouldn't know what to do automatically.

{{Ada/--| foo a[[bar] <- baz]}}  (problem domain notation, comment rendering broken)
...
--  see []  (wiki aware author, working. Almost, because of the bar in "|here]")

versus

--  foo a[[bar] <- baz]  (problem domain notation, working)
...
--  see [[http://foo.bar.baz|here]]  (wiki aware author, partially broken)

-- gb 14:15, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Compiler Tips?

Will it be interesting to have a section on how to best use a specific compiler? For example,

1. How to best use large objects with compiler X.
2. How to interpret a given message? (Why is selected_component not the selected component?) How to get better messages.
3. Compiler Y's treatment of possibly large discriminated records is different from compiler X's.
4. Source file handling with different compilers, how to set them up portably.

For example, you can get a different error message making a seemingly meaningless change to your sources. The latter is what has made me think about this addition to the book. After replacing x.component with x.all.component the error messages (of course?) change, which is helpful. gb 08:59, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

I think it is very interesting, although I'm not sure whether I'll contribute anything to the section, I have only used GNAT. We could start in the Ada Programming/Tips section, and if it grows out, we can move it to a new independent section. ManuelGR 12:01, 2 December 2006 (UTC)