[BRLTTY] Feature request: configurable prompt pattern
Nicolas Pitre
nico at fluxnic.net
Wed Mar 14 14:18:29 EDT 2018
On Wed, 14 Mar 2018, Dave Mielke wrote:
> [quoted lines by Nicolas Pitre on 2018/03/13 at 22:10 -0400]
>
> I accidentally lost a quote that I wanted to challenge. It was something like:
>
> >With great power comes great responsibility (complexity).
>
> I agree with the first part, but not with the second. In other words, I don't
> equate responsibility with complexity. Let's look at an example. As a parent, I
> indeed have a great responsibility insofar as raising our children is
> concerned. Does that justify me making the principles by which they're to live
> be complex? No way! I do my best to make things as easy for them to understand
> and grasp since that maximizes their ability to remember and easily apply them,
> and, therefore, to be able to grow up properly.
My turn to challenge your interpretation. ;-)
The great responsibility raising your children is incumbent on you. That
means *your* life becomes more complex, not necessarily theirs.
> I also disagree wth applying a truism for people to non-people. Software, after
> all, isn't responsible for anything. Those who implement software, however, are
> indeed responsible for what their software does, how it works, etc. Doing all
> they can to ensure that those who use their software get into as little trouble
> as possible is the responsibility of those who've been granted the power of
> providing software that others use.
Same thing here: if you want to use a powerful tool or feature, it can't
be simple. Yet, if you want to use a powerful tool, it is your
responsibility to deal with its complexity. Doesn't mean it is wrong
not wanting any complexity, but then you need to live with preconfigured
features and that's OK (I do it all the time).
This prompt matching feature gets complex with the use of regexp. It
provides tremendous power over the current implementation. If you don't
need that power, stick to the default and forget that regexps exist.
And this is not a critical feature either, meaning that if someone
messes up the prompt matching option, then only PRPROMPT / NXPROMPT will
be crippled, but that won't cause real trouble to the unfortunate
user given that the display and basic navigation functions are still
available.
Nicolas
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