How to submit a proposal:

Send an appropriately formatted email to proptest@nomic.net. Easy, if you know what the "appropriate formatting" is, obscurum per obscurius otherwise. Thus:
The Format

Proposals must be enclosed within a pair of proposal tags to be recognized by the parser:

<Proposal>blah blah blah</Proposal>
As with html tags (after which they were clearly modeled) the proposal tags themselves are case insensitive. <proposal> should1 be recognized just a readily as <PrOpOsAl>. There are several atributes which may be placed within the open proposal tag: What they do should be intuitive (all are verbs indicative of their respective functions), but here's a quick rundown for those of us with broken pineal glands2: I tried to make these work as you would expect if you know html. A few caveats are in order, however, viz.:

The Test

This seems to work with the severely limited set of test cases I've put to it, which, as all programmers know, means it probably doesn't work at all. Additionally, I cannot even begin to anticipate the vast array of wierd, malformed, and all-around pathological input3 that this program will be expected to handle properly--which is why I'd appreciate it if everyone would give it a shot (preferably a few), with input both normal and odd.

If it accepts your input, this page will be updated to reflect the changes you made. Otherwise, it will mail you (and me) a message explaining (tersely, and thus poorly) why it failed. So, if it works as you expect, there's no need to tell me--I'll see the results; likewise if it generates an error. If it accepts your input, but then proceeds to mangle it, however, a copy of your input would be greatly appreciated so I can track down the problem.

Also, in case anyone wants to grok my confusing, ill-commented code, it can be found here and here. The latter code has been mostly obseleted by the switch to MySQL, and will probably be dispensed with entirely very soon.


1This (and all remarks above) describe an ideal version of my program. Consequently, you may find output produced by the actual program to differ somewhat from the ideal output . . . which is, or course, why we're testing it.

2Philosophy joke. About Descartes, natural intuition, and access to the forms. 'Nuff said.

3<libel>Originating mostly with Josh, I expect.</libel>


Last updated Fri Jul 21 04:28:20 UTC 2000.
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