-> "When I start at a studio, I almost always find myself building or rebuilding a pipeline for game dialogue.
I wanted to write down here some things I’ve learned about that, my reasoning behind it, and where it bridges the gap between other pieces of gamedev. I hope there’s something here you’ll find useful."
I was surprised how murky comparatively recent tech oral(ish) history can be. My memory of what did or didn't work in the search box and + was different to what I read.
And, my memory not withstanding it appears that intent and meaning of + in search changed over time.
I think the murkiness of this recent history is more a matter of misunderstanding at the time than people misremembering after the fact.
I remember believing it prevented optionality for more than common words. I can't recall exactly when I believed this or if I ever knew it had changed to a verbatim meaning, but quotes always seemed the more natural symbol for the latter. I'm sure my belief in the obligatory-but-not-verbatim meaning of '+' was supported by its apparent contrast to '-', which excluded search results with that term, since it makes sense that the opposing symbols would have opposing meanings.
Why? The hardware has been "stable" for about 2 decades now. I reckon you'd have more trouble with the IDE/USB interface drivers these days. God knows connecting an old LPT CNC machine to a modern computer proved ridiculously hard - ended up just using a very old laptop with an integrated LPT port/controller :D
I don't think it's about new features or anything, but running regular regression tests to make sure that changes elsewhere in the kernel don't break it.
Informal explanation: https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2023/August/Ant-wa...