Re: [ANN] org-dp now on MELPA

[Thorsten Jolitz <tjolitz@gmail.com>]

Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us> writes:

> Thorsten Jolitz <tjolitz@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Xebar Saram <zeltakc@gmail.com> writes: 
>>
>> Hi Xebar, 
>>
>>> Thx Thorsten 
>>>
>>> i still use it daily :D 
>>
>> I did not know that I have a user actually, because when I announced
>> it a year ago or so it never drew much attention (a bit to my
>> surprise, I must admit). So I'm happy about the news ;-) 
>
> It's also mentioned here, though it may be a unfair characterization
> of org-dp:
>
>     http://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/2885/1974

Thanks for advertising a bit! 

#+BEGIN_QUOTE
org-dp is a meant to make it easer for to use "lisp representation" to
create new "Org syntax representation" (as this it not a goal of
org-element per se).
#+END_QUOTE
                         
Its not wrong or unfair, but not what I would say either. org-element
does the same thing - parse the given text, work on the internal
representation, write the new text by interpreting the modified internal
representation. Only that it parses the whole (maybe narrowed) buffer
and has all context info, and mostly is not used to write Org syntax
(but rather those of the export backends).

 Maybe this excerpt from the README is a better characteristic:

,----
| Library org-dp is meant for programming at the local level,
| i.e. without any (contextual) information except those about the
| parsed element at point. It is designed to make using the Org-mode
| parser/interpreter framework at local level as convenient as using
| it at the global level (with a complete parse-tree produced by
| `org-element-parse-buffer` available). 
`----

And the 'd' in 'dp' is important, since this is a different programming
style. Its more declarative (in the sense of "A program that describes
what computation should be performed and not how to compute it") because
the programmer 'declares' he wants a certain element type with certain
parameter values at a certain place. Parsing the existing element and
writing the new/modified element, the HowTo, is mostly left to the
parser framework.

Source code that uses org-dp looks quite different from the usual Elisp
sources in Emacs/Org libraries that work on the textual representation.

-- 
cheers,
Thorsten