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Re: [O] Citation syntax: a revised proposal


From: Richard Lawrence
Subject: Re: [O] Citation syntax: a revised proposal
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2015 19:12:53 -0800
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.4 (gnu/linux)

Hi Samuel,

Samuel Wales <address@hidden> writes:

> basically, i am concerned about syntax creep in the big picture and
> its downstream consequences.  for example, it's more efficient to
> support, and for the user to remember, a single general syntax than a
> whole bunch of special syntaxes.

In general, I share your point of view here, which is one reason why I
proposed the s-expression part of the syntax for citations.  I still
like that idea, and I think Nicolas is right that it would be good to
extend it to other sorts of objects in Org.  You're right that
consistency in that syntax would be a good thing.  Moreover, Org already
has syntax that looks a lot like plists in #+ATTR_BACKEND lines and in
Babel source block headers, so it seems natural to adopt something like
it for other sorts of objects.  I think that is the right way to go,
both from the perspective of consistency and from the perspective of
expressiveness.

I guess the rejoinder to all this, though, is that this point of view
can be taken too far.  I am glad, for example, that Org uses different
syntax for delimiting source blocks and delimiting emphasized text.
Insisting on syntactic consistency there would give you something like
HTML...and I am glad that writing Org is not like writing HTML.
(Likewise, I will be glad when we have a syntax specially-designed for
writing citations, even if it looks nothing like the syntax other
things.)

So I think the right question is: what is the correct range of
application for a uniform syntax for user-specifiable extensions, for
citations or otherwise?  I don't know the answer to that, but
`properties of existing objects' seems like a good start.  This needs
more thought, in another thread, but thank you for reminding us to keep
it in mind.

Best,
Richard




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