Re: Language identifiers

[tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye)]

Aloha François,

François Pinard <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> Hello, Org people.
>
> Seeing again the (org) Languages node in the manual, I decided to check
> all my #+BEGIN_SRC for language tags, which I too often improvise, for
> normalizing them.  I noticed a few things, and wonder if the manual
> should be amended, or if I should change my habits instead.
>
> - I was using lower case "c" and "r", while the manual suggests
>   upper case "C" and "R" instead.  Both seem to work (in Emacs at
>   least).  Should the manual be amended to say that case does not
>   matter?  If then, should the manual stick uniformly to lower case?
>
> - The identifier in the left column did not work, but if I change it to
>   the identifier in the right column, the content highlights (in
>   Emacs).  The manual does not list it.
>
>   | config     | conf     |
>   | email      | mail     |
>   | make       | makefile |
>   | postscript | ps       |

"The core Babel functions (viewing, export, tangling, etc…) are language
agnostic and will work even for languages that are not explicitly
supported. Explicit language-specific support is required only for
evaluation of code blocks in a language."  See
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages.html.
>
> - I was using "elisp" instead of "emacs-lisp" and "javascript" instead
>   of "js".  Both seem to work (in Emacs at least).  If there are many
>   alternate languages identifiers for a language, should the manual list
>   all acceptable identifiers?
>
> - Tag "xml" seems to work nicely (within Emacs).  The manual does not
>   list it.
>
> I wonder what "are supported" really means, in the first sentence.
> Maybe the fact that Emacs supports a language tag does not mean that Org
> supports it?  Maybe exporters would fail to render them nicely?  Maybe a
> few more words could be added to the page for explaining what users
> should expect, or not expect.  Currently, I do not know whether if the
> list is missing a few identifiers, or if I'm not using them properly.
>

See above.  Suggested revisions to the sentence are welcome.  I believe
I wrote the sentence, but Eric S. will review and decide whether or not
to make changes.

> Other tiny details about the table at the beginning of this Info page.
> It would be clearer if there was a separating line between the title
> line and the table contents.  A vertical line separating both halves
> would be welcome too, one has to take a few seconds to understand that
> this is a two column table, each column itself holding two columns.
> Finally, the sorted entries are presented row wise in this two column
> table; the table would be easier to consult if the sorted entries were
> presented column wise instead.
>

I totally agree.  Do you know how to do this in texinfo?  Can you
propose a patch?

All the best,
Tom

> François
>
>
>

-- 
Thomas S. Dye
http://www.tsdye.com