I think the best example of using strings over ints is DNS.  How many people know IP address of their favorite website? Using a numeric based name space is great for machines, but in order for the web to be usable, we had to create DNS.

I suspect the same logic would apply here. If we are going to have a usable api, we should use a string.

Mike O.

With that in mind, you would have to do a lot to convince me that int's were a better solution for an API. 
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Jeff Eaton <jeff@viapositiva.net> wrote:
On May 21, 2009, at 11:50 AM, Chris Johnson wrote:

After all, we wouldn't want developers to have actually document
anything they write.  ;-)

Well... documentation is needed in either case. But with ints, collisions are absolutely inevitable. I ran into this with VotingAPI early on -- I had a const for 'vote_type', and it had 3 values out of the box. Pretty quickly, two other modules both defined fourth value types. suddenly, those modules couldn't co-exist with each other.

There's nothing in *my* documentation that could have solved that, other than a pointer to a wiki page where everyone claimed ints.