[Pmwiki-users] AsSpaced function released)

John Rankin john.rankin
Tue Oct 5 16:10:23 CDT 2004


On Tuesday, 5 October 2004 8:11 PM, chr at home.se wrote:
>> See
>> http://www.pmwiki.org/pmwiki2/pmwiki.php/Cookbook/AbbreviationPlurals
>> 
>> This gives 2 options: format them using small caps and just not 
>> wikifying them. And the example above should read
>> 
>>     Markup('nowiki','>[[','/\b([[:upper:]][[:upper:]]+s)/e',
>>            "Keep('$1')");
>
>Great!  Shouldn't there be something at the end of the pattern that 
>indicates an 'end-of-word' there?

As I understand it (using 'understand' in the monkey see, monkey do sense),
the \b says match whole words only. The good and bad thing about php (like
fortran) is that it seems to work even if you aren't quite sure what you
are doing.
>
>And it means we have a place to start add other ideas about how we could 
>make acronyms... hang on -- I thought this was only relevant for acronyms, 
>and not for abbrievations?

Perhaps a recipe requiring wikiwords to have 4 or more letters
would be enough? That's easy to do.

Acronyms, abbreviations and lists...

<pedantAlert> (mostly off topic)

The abbreviations set consists of at least 8 subsets:
1 acronyms are words formed from the first letters of other words,
  like ANZAC and ERMA
2 initialisms (American usage & an excellent neologism) are formed
  from the first letters of words, but aren't themselves words,
  like IBM and WMD
3 bisexuals (I made that up) which some people say as acronyms
  and others say as initialisms, like URL (Earl or you are ell)
4 upper case abbreviations are written in upper case, but are
  neither acronyms nor initialisms, like HTML and XML
5 appreviations spoken as words (cf acronyms), like ProAm, WiFi
  and HiFi
6 abbreviations spoken letter by letter (cf initialisms), 
  like PhD and MSc
7 abbreviations spoken as the word, like Dr (UK) and Dr. (US)
8 abbreviations which have become ordinary words, like laser
  and fortran (and started life as members of 1, 3, or 5)

So the recipe covers cases 1-4. We need something else for
cases 5-6 (accidental wikiwords, which may or may not want 
to become wikiwords). 

Case 8 we can ignore, unless we want to use the <dfn> tag.

This got me thinking about Borges' classification of animals:

	1.  	those that belong to the Emperor,
	2.  	embalmed ones,
	3.  	those that are trained,
	4.  	suckling pigs,
	5.  	mermaids,
	6.  	fabulous ones,
	7.  	stray dogs,
	8.  	those included in the present classification,
	9.  	those that tremble as if they were mad,
	10.  	innumerable ones,
	11.  	those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
	12.  	others,
	13.  	those that have just broken a flower vase,
	14.  	those that from a long way off look like flies.

</pedantAlert>

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin





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