Hrm, maybe some way to handle [{printf}] or [&printf] as a special case...

What you're saying, in a nutshell, is that the perl man pages should enjoy a special status that no other objects in the schema-less namespace do. I for one think that is inappropriate, not to mention unnecessary.

Not just man pages, also most =items from perlfunc.

I for one think that is inappropriate, not to mention unnecessary.

Convenience is never necessary. It is, however, convenient.

People can toss out a print in the chatterbox, for ease of typing. If it happens not to resolve cleanly, it's no big deal. But when typing up a nice long meditation into which one has (presumably) already put significant minutes if not hours of thought, one can reasonably be expected to take the time to spell print, just as one can reasonably be expected to write TIMTOWTDI, lart, File::Find, or lwall-quotes.

I'd almost guess that you use Perl only for one liners, and switch to a more verbose language (Java?) for larger projects. It's silly to assume that all people who already spent this much time on thinking, like to spend even more time on formatting their document. Links are so incredibly ubiquitous, and used inline, that the most convenient method of using them should be preferred at all times. That's why we have the square brackets in the first place. Links to perldocs and functions are (ought to be) placed much more often than links to normal nodes. They deserve a special status.

There's a limit to how much work we should expect the PerlMonks engine to compensate for our laziness, and I believe your proposal rather exceeds it.

Perl Monks engine? Huh, I never implied such a thing. For all I care, a normal user just writes up some meditations (or whichever node type) that link to the respective actual documents. This can be automated. I volunteer. Doing this once will eventually save me time, even if nobody else uses it, and even though I don't use this site that much anymore (partly exactly because of the way things are done here, and this is a good example). If only because then all the old links start making sense again, which was the point of the root of this thread. (Gawd, I find it hard to believe that 4 years later, this (to me rather trivial) issue still exists.)

Don't be afraid to learn from the wiki work flow, which is to make linking incredibly easy. So easy that you can do it while typing, instead of as an afterthought.

I'm not sure if you've visited the Library lately, but it, and all of our on-site perl docs, do in fact link to perldoc.perl.org. As for keeping our copies of the perl docs current — Not only does it not make sense to duplicate (crappily) what the folks at perldoc.perl.org are doing, the site maintenance crew don't have the resources to put into it.

This site doesn't need copies. Even in 2002, when I posted the OP of this thread, I already said that links would suffice. And maintaining that can't be hard. All it needs is some new nodes for new documents, like uniintro, and perlcheat.

Perhaps, but this is more about HTML than Perl. Be glad you don't have to write perlop.

I'm speechless.

Convenience is never necessary. It is, however, convenient.

Editor macros are great tools for convenience.

[a] user just writes up some meditations ... that link to the respective actual documents. ... then all the old links start making sense again

So, the continuation of this debate is just a part of the "single-word title" flamefest, raging in another thread somewhere.

We're building the house of the future together.

So, the continuation of this debate is just a part of the "single-word title" flamefest, raging in another thread somewhere.

In the light of single word titles being banned, I see a GREAT opportunity for linking all single word links to documentation! After all, if there are no single word titles on Perl Monks anymore, it's a piece of cake, even in the most chaotic code, to do this in the engine. It doesn't even need a lot of manually added nodes then.

I didn't know about this thread. It may indeed be a good idea to ban single worded titles to eliminate the simplest forms of automated spam. (At the very least it'll force spammers to be smarter about random title generation.) Especially if that can be used to make linking to documentation easier. In light of this new information, I reconsidered the titles for the nodes "perlcheat" and "perlpodtut", and suggest that they be "How about $&?" instead.

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap', perl6_server => 'feather' }