4 ms·
Same thing that xkcd stands for: nothing. It's just a series of letters that is unlikely to exist in any normal word, so he can search for it easily later, and
by iamwil 15y ago
Same thing that xkcd stands for: nothing.
It's just a series of letters that is unlikely to exist in any normal word, so he can search for it easily later, and replace it with a number. Since you never know what order the footnotes end up being, he starts off with a key in a hash, rather than index in an array.
- rcfox 15y agoYou'd think that this would be automated in modern editors... The only thing I've seen that bothers to do it is LaTeX.
- pbiggar 15y agoRestructured text does this too.
- angli 15y agoI'm actually interested in how this is done. Is there a systematic method for it, or does one pick an arbitrary string? I've always used (and been forced to renumber) ordinals, so this seems quite useful.