Re: Org Syntax Specification

["Sébastien Miquel" <sebastien.miquel@posteo.eu>]

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Hi,

The new document seems much clearer. It makes a nice complement to the
manual and we should definitely lose the (draft). Thank you Timothy
for the work.

> Lastly, having spent a while looking at the syntax, I’m wondering if 
> we should take this opportunity to mark some of the syntactic elements 
> we’ve become less happy with as *(depreciated)*. I’m specifically 
> thinking of the TeX-style LaTeX fragments which have been a bit of a 
> pain. To quote Nicolas in org-syntax.org:
>
>     It would introduce incompatibilities with previous Org versions,
>     but support for |$...$| (and for symmetry, |$$...$$|) constructs
>     ought to be removed.
>
>     They are slow to parse, fragile, redundant and imply false
>     positives. — ngz
>

This quote has been mentioned a few times lately, and no one has yet
spoken in favor of the $…$ syntax, so I'll have a quick go.

It is easier to use, easier to read and more commonly used (and known)
in tex documents (a quick web search for sample tex documents confirms
the latter). Removing this syntax would make org slightly harder to
pick up, with respect to writing scientific documents.

As for the listed shortcomings, I don't think we know whether its
slowness is significant and false positives can be avoided by using
the \dollar entity (possibly ?). In my own use, the only usability
issue I can think of is false negatives while writing : inserting a
space or other such characters at the end of a snippet removes the
fontification (I solve this by modifying the fontification regexps).

Regards,

-- 
Sébastien Miquel

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