Re: [PATCH] Possibility of using alternative separators in macros

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Hi all,

Thanks for your comments, Bastien and Nicolas.

I think macros can work out of the box as a perfect 'backend' for those
LaTeX commands that include at least one argument with textual content.
In my case they are very useful to 'extend' the markup language. Apart
from the LaTeX example that I put previously
(\foreignlanguage{lang}{short-text}), there are commands like
\textsc{text in small caps}, \textcolor{color}{text}, and so on. When
one of the arguments consists of textual content, even if it is a short
text, it can be tedious to escape constantly commas[1]. Anyway, I
understand that my use case may not be that of the rest of the users,
and what is a 'problem' for me, it may not be seen as a problem by other
users; therefore, I fully understand Bastien's warnings about making a
modification to something that already works fine, and has been working
fine since always.

Nicolas's suggestion seemed the most reasonable, or the least
destructive, in the hypothetical scenario that there would be a great
demand among users of an alternative separator. Now I see unlikely,
however, that such a demand exists ;-) So, if my use case is a minority,
of course I agree with give up this proposal...

[1] To mitigate 'comma issue' I wrote a function that escapes commas
when saving document :-D

Best regards,

Juan Manuel 

Nicolas Goaziou writes:

> Hello,
>
> Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> thank you for the patch.  I understand the general idea, but I think
>> we should be careful not to overload the macro syntax - escaping the
>> coma seems okay to me.  I'm closing this suggestion.
>>
>> I'm cc'ing Nicolas: if he thinks it's a useful addition, I won't of
>> course insist on rejecting it.
>
> This is a followup to a previous discussion in this mailing list, in
> which Juan Manuel explained his use-case for a different argument
> separator in macros. I noticed then that there was an opening for
> a backward compatible syntax extension for it. As I was also not certain
> it would be a good idea overall, I suggested him to start a new, more
> visible, thread with the proposal, and collect feedback.
>
> So, maybe it is a bit early to close it.
>
> BTW, I would like to amend the proposed syntax, so as to limit friction
> with the rest of Org. What would be more reasonable is the following:
>
>    {{{macroname·(...)}}}
>
> where · is either nothing or a _single_ printable non-alphanumeric
> non-space non-parenthesis character that isn't already meaningful in
> Org. For example, if for some reason, we limit ourselves to ASCII
> characters only, the set of allowed separators would be:
>
>                        !   %   &   ,   ;   ?   `
>
> So, again, I'm not saying we should do this. TBH, I'm not convinced by
> the idea of duplicate syntax (comma-escaping and alternate characters)
> for the same thing. But hard-core macro users may have a word to say
> about it.
>
> WDYT?
>
> Regards,