Anonymous user
Template talk:Output?: Difference between revisions
→Don't do this: I really like the output
No edit summary |
(→Don't do this: I really like the output) |
||
| (3 intermediate revisions by 3 users not shown) | |||
Line 8:
::::I tried again. It's getting kind of bulky again. I wish I could think of a more concise way to put it. --[[User:Mwn3d|Mwn3d]] 17:47, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
:::::I just gave it a go too. Feel free to revert the change if you don't like it. --[[User:Arm|Arm]] 15:58 16/08/2011 (GMT-3)
== Don't do this ==
Please, please, don't make showing output normative. I have noticed a trend towards this on RC, and I dislike it. In particular, the "beta" version of this template says "It is good practice to show the output of a program whenever there is output.". I disagree that this is good practice.
In particular, I consider it useless clutter to show output per-program on tasks ''where the output is specified so precisely as to be identical across all correct programs'' — the output need only be shown once, in the task description.
In other cases, I wish that it be left up to the discretion of the task, and there not be a RC-wide policy of including output. —[[User:Kevin Reid|Kevin Reid]] 21:17, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
:I don't believe it should be the norm for RC either, but I do think it has advantages in catching wrong implementations ''especially'' where the task goal is to give short, precise output such as in [[Range extraction]] amongst others, where, with the best will in the world, it can be difficult to see that last t to be crossed in ones implementation. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 21:34, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
::I concur with Kevin that it should be left up to the task. If a language example isn't up to snuff, it can be left to someone with the opportunity to run the code to detect this. Otherwise, there's separate maintenance between code and output, and that ''will'' get desynchronized. An additional reason to not require output comes from a more technical problem...sufficiently large pages don't get emitted by the MediaWiki engine because PHP hits a memory limit. That's why MW warns when editing a page which has become very large. Similarly, large pages exacerbate an issue I've overhead numerous complaints about elsewhere; when someone is looking for something in particular, they don't want to see anything but the two or three languages they're interested in. --[[User:Short Circuit|Michael Mol]] 22:54, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
:I really like seeing output in the tasks. I don't think there are many tasks that define a character-by-character output (the string processing tasks, yes, but I think there are more mathematical ones that don't define it so precisely), so you get subtleties in output. There was at least one task where showing the output caused some confusion with the language and resulted in a language change (it was how it displayed complex numbers). When the output is defined down to the character, I understand not showing it, but otherwise it's nice to see it to verify the example and to see how the language displays things (like those weird languages that use underscores for negative signs). If there are technical reasons for not showing it, maybe there could be a technical solution (how large does that page have to be?). --[[User:Mwn3d|Mwn3d]] 00:15, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
| |||