Re: Should comments break paragraphs?

[Eric Schulte <schulte.eric@gmail.com>]

Nicolas Goaziou <n.goaziou@gmail.com> writes:

> Eric Schulte <schulte.eric@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> So are you proposing to remove comments from Org-mode entirely? 
>
> Certainly not.
>

Great, then I think we're much closer together on this than I originally
thought.

>
> I'm on the "good enough" side and I simply suggest to live with it.
> Also, if you badly need inline comments, there's the empty "comment"
> macro:
>
>   #+MACRO: comment 
>
>   Some text {{{comment(This is my comment)}}} and some more.
>

I'm not suggesting adding inline comments, only that comment lines be
treated as "" instead of "\n".

>
>> But if we treat comments as semantically empty, then maybe they should
>> be ignored by the parser?
>
> Yes, we can ignore them at the parser level. But what about the rest of
> Org? There are many places that do not rely on the parser and do not
> ignore comments (lists being an example, agenda being another one, and
> I'm pretty sure comments at some locations can break Babel too).
>
> Something could be done, but again, it would certainly not be
> a one-liner in org-element.el or ox.el.
>

I'm happy to work to fix places where babel is breaking comments.

>
>>> Even if you move it to ox.el, this is not an acceptable solution. Think
>>> about the following example
>>>
>>>  - item 1
>>>
>>>    # with a comment
>>>
>>>  - item 2
>>>
>>> If you simply delete matching lines, you break the list.
>>>
>>
>> Yes, I would argue that this list should be broken, because with or
>> without the comment the items are separated by two blank lines.
>
> On the other hand, visually, this list looks perfectly correct.
>
>> In my opinion comments as semantically empty lines is a simple rule
>> for both users and parsers to understand.
>
> Comments are already almost semantically empty lines. That's why:
>
>   Text
>   # Comment
>   Other Text
>
> generates two paragraphs in Org (and in every back-end excepted `latex',
> but that's a different problem). They basically act as a paragraph
> separator, much like blank lines.
>
> Also, note that if they really are empty lines, they cannot be inlined
> within paragraphs either.
>

Sorry I was unclear, see above, by "semantically empty" I meant
replacing comment lines with "" instead of the current behavior (except
in the latex exporter) which replaces them with "\n".

Cheers,

>
>
> Regards,

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte