Separator for multiple authors on command lines (was: Can we separate authors with ; instead of \n please?)

Colin D Bennett colin at gibibit.com
Fri Mar 6 14:57:58 GMT 2009


On Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:34:22 +1100
Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

> ian.clatworthy at internode.on.net writes:
> 
> > With this in mind, I'm wondering whether it would make searching
> > authors easier if they were separated by ; instead of a newline
> > internally.
> 
> A semicolon would cause problems with command-lines; ‘;’ is a command
> separator.
> 
> Perhaps comma (‘,’) is better as a delimiter, since it's such a common
> delimiter for other multi-value arguments on command lines.

I don't know; I think one could argue that the semicolon is a good
choice because

1. If you're specifying an author name, you almost certainly have
   either spaces or '<>' (for email address) in the argument, so you
   need to quote it anyway.

2. A comma fairly often occurs in people's names, like
   "Wilson Jones, PhD" or perhaps a project prefers that developers
   (although I don't find it the best option IMO) use "SURNAME, GIVEN
   NAME" instead of "GIVEN NAME SURNAME".

Perhaps the internal separator (comma or semicolon) should not affect
the end-user.  It's simply a property which is a list of strings, and
the user should not be exposed to the internal representation, right?

Regards,
Colin
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