Template talk:Dev/null

Dev?

What does this do? <!-- blah --> denotes a HTML comment. I'm confused. -- Fred Gandt ^{(talk|contribs)} 19:08, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Nothing? It's only a html comment. Btw: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/null

I think it was a test for slashes in page/template names. Strife's comment in the history: (the slash in /dev/null causes problems at times ~_~)

--Kuraiko Yoshikawa 19:53, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Kuraiko. I saw Strifes comment but couldn't figure what it was about (not so good with RL programing yet (some might say I'm not so good with LSL either, I dunno)). I Googled and searched w3 but turned up nothing helpful. *wonders why Google didn't give me the Wikipedia link* So I wonder...If it does nothing...How and why did it force it's way into my user page? Never mind about answering that. It probably doesn't matter. Thanks again. :-) -- Fred Gandt ^{(talk|contribs)} 20:06, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Template:KeyCombo use it (dunno why...) and is used in yours userpage ^^ --Kuraiko Yoshikawa 20:26, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Ahhh. TYTY. I was just trying to figure out why I had a black hole on my page (thanks for the wikipedia link again) but, had to walk the dog. I guess the KeyCombo makes a load of bits that need to be flushed *shrugs*. Anyway thanx to you I am less confused and more enlightened. very kind of you to respond. See you about! -- Fred Gandt ^{(talk|contribs)} 21:10, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

In the previous version of the wiki parsing engine it would execute all parameters of a template or a parser function when they were encountered. That means that if you had an #if expression it would execute both the truth and false results, but it would only return the result for the correct branch. This was problematic for templates that used the #var extension because while you would get the correct result from #if, you would get the #vars from both branches. The solution was to make the parameter name conditional, so you would do something like {{#if:{{{blah|}}}|{{{{#if:{{{blah|}}}|good|bad}}|}}}}. In this example the result of calling the template is only returned if blah is true but if blah is false, bad is called but the text not returned. Now to remove one of the conditionals I created a template that did absolutely nothing. So now I could do: {{{{#if:{{{blah|}}}|good|dev/null}}|}}. Template:! was used for this purpose previously. Of course with the new wiki parsing engine, this sort of thing is no longer needed but old templates take time to be rewritten.

P.S. The black hole aspect of this template was that it would eat parameters. -- Strife ^{(talk|contribs)} 04:10, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Okies. TY *sheepishly withdraws* Those templates still look like gobbledygook to me. -- Fred Gandt ^{(talk|contribs)} 12:13, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Good news! This template is no longer used anywhere! I have rewritten each call site not to use it. -- Strife ^{(talk|contribs)} 14:02, 1 June 2012 (PDT)