Re: Org-syntax: Intra-word markup

[Tom Gillespie <tgbugs@gmail.com>]

I don't mean to be a wet blanket, but the edge cases for
the current markup syntax are already hard enough to
implement correctly, to the point where different parts of
Org mode are inconsistent. Intra-word markup isn't viable
because there simply isn't any sane way to parse something
like *hello world*/hrm/oh no*. The other issue is that this will
degrade parsing performance because almost every
character could precede the start of a markup section.

I recommend anyone suggesting solutions try to implement
something that can parse the markup unambiguously with
lots of nasty test cases. You will likely find that it is impossible
to consistently tokenize markup, and that you have to hand
write a whole bunch of heuristics, making Org syntax even
harder to implement correctly.

Any solution that suggests extending how =/*~+_  can be
used gets a hard no from me. I could see teaching other
exporters how to interpret \emph{hello}world, but trying for
to have any sane behavior for something like
why *hello*world oh no a wild askterisk*
is not worth it.

Best,
Tom