[pmwiki-users] (:varindex:) etc (Was: Re: $FmtV and $FmtP)

[chr at home.se]

On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> > PS. Is the (:varindex:) documented somewhere? The entry on the page
> > MarkupMasterIndex simply points to PmWiki.Directives, but I can't find
> > anything there...
> 
> Not at the moment.  So many things to document......  :-|

true.. Would it be possible for us to help here?

> > Something like (:varindex:) together with (:functionindex:) would be
> > perfect for documenting small software projects - assuming that the names 
> > of functions are linked just as variables are linked today. 
> 
> Variables currently auto-link based on $WikiWord; I've been thinking
> that WikiWord(...) (with the parens) ought to automatically link somewhere
> as well.  And ideally we'd eliminate the WikiWord requirement somehow,
> but I haven't gotten that far yet.

I take it that the problem is coming up with a suitable regexp... which is 
quite difficult if you want this to work for arbitrary function names such 
as 'f(x)'...

I also assume that we have two goals here:
* Make the function name become a link to the correct page
* Render the function name using some special character style

How about if 'function(...)' only links when a page called 'function'
exists? Or if '[[#function]]' is found on some pages containing a special
directive?

Alternatively, we could introduce an explicit markup for functions, which
in addition to creating the link, also renders them in a special way, e.g.

	(:fcn f:)(x)	->	f(x)

Anyway, although quite interesting and useful for some of us, the majority
of PmWiki's users probably won't need it... so it's got a really low
prirority...

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr