rdearman wrote:The problem with you method is there is no user validation. Because you have to log into Twitter in the 6wc each participant is identified. With email your email address validated you because you would have had to log into your emails system. So not really being nice, just keeping malicious people from messing up your score
Is there no facility in phpBB that could be used to validate users for external pages...?
As for not liking semantic whitespace, I was once the same. I still don't like it, but I really get Guido's point about the job of spaces in brace-delimited languages being ambiguous. If spaces mean nothing to a computer, there's nothing to stop anyone using the spacing in a misleading way that implies semantics that don't match the exact semantics of the { ... } structuring.
Guido was right -- it's just that his solution is now suboptimal. We should not be using plaintext editors for programming any more. Our editors should be smart. A C-like should have *no* leading whitespace in its source file, but the editor should be able to render it with lines indented automatically. That takes us one step more into visual programming, because for automatic indentation to work, you can't have the programmer independently marking start and end block tokens -- ie. { and } have to be treated as a single semantic unit, meaning that the programmer would have a choice of "Insert new block", "convert to block" and "move line inside block".
Such a non-literal text editor would also have to opportunity to render things as tables, something that has to be done by non-semantic whitespace at the moment, which Guido is actively against, but has at least made possible in Python.
eg:
Code: Select all
insert_multiple_into_thingummy ( ("thingummy1",123, "pop" ,my_contents),
("thing2" ,15745,"burst",stuff ))
Notice how I've (unconciously!) switched between putting the commas in a vertical pattern (representing column separator lines) and putting them directly after the data, which means that there's no line (eg from 123 down to 15745) and instead the column line appears to be implied by the contents ("pop" and "burst").
I personally find this idea of lining things up helps me remember what sort of data is expected where and put in the right stuff (which I think is particularly important in contexts where arguments are optional -- I'm thinking of JavaScript here in particular!) and I typically start doing it, but then when I get to the fourth of fifth line and type lots, I don't tend to go back and edit the previous lines to maintain the table structure -- I only end up continuing with the new column width... until I get bored after typing multiple lines that are narrower and switch back to the original spacing.
Sorry for going wildly off-topic... I guess I'm abusing this forum by using it as a prompt for recalling all the computer programming stuff.