I'm fascinated by the use of random word combinations instead of a random alphanumeric sequence for passing a unique URL.
What was the reasoning behind this decision?
On one hand, it sort of acts like a phonetic alphabet if you want to read out the URL over skype.
But on the other hand - is OberonNostalgicCeciliaVoltage really that easy to spell if you aren't a native English speaker?
Hello. As other comments mentioned, it is easier to communicate these URLs over the phone. These words were chosen very specifically to be short, phonetically different from one another, easy to understand over the phone, and also recognizable internationally. Here is the list:
I forget which site it is off the top of my head but there's a pretty prominent gif sharing site that does it I often get linked to.
I think it's basically just as you say, for English speakers anyway, a bit of an easier way to read out URLs when talking in person or voice chatting. With non-English speakers it doesn't do much, and you're forced to say letter for letter as you would with a lot of other URLs.
One twist on this would be to somehow limit the wordlist to words that have relatively unambiguous pronunciation, and maybe limit those to the 100 000 most commonly used ones.
Of course then you'll have to use more words for a similar number of links.
I stumbled upon your site a few days back. It's very neat and nicely done, but I had to close it because it treated C and C++ together. I wanted to quickly check how a code will behave in C89 vs C99 (or was it even compliant with C89 standards). Is there any chance your site will differentiate C89, C99 and C++ in near future? Thanks!
Btw a workaround: You can enable the shell (from languages dropdown) and "cat > file.cpp" and compile it yourself with whatever compilers you want.
You are also able to "apt-get" any other compilers/packages you need.