Re: [PATCH] Add support for $…$ latex fragments followed by a dash

[Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com>]

On 28/01/2022 23:37, Timothy wrote:
> 
>> There is no point to discuss deprecation of $…$ and ... while usage of
>> such constructs is not discouraged by the org manual
> 
> Isn’t the point of discussing depreciation now that we’d change the manual etc.
> to discourage it? 😛

It is funny that nobody have checked what the manual actually states:

> Text within the usual LaTeX math delimiters. To avoid conflicts with
> currency specifications, single ‘$’ characters are only recognized as
> math delimiters if the enclosed text contains at most two line breaks,
> is directly attached to the ‘$’ characters with no whitespace in
> between, and if the closing ‘$’ is followed by whitespace, punctuation
> or a dash. For the other delimiters, there is no such restriction, so
      ^^^^^^
> when in doubt, use ‘\(...\)’ as inline math delimiters.

I have no idea whether it ever worked in such way. So either the manual 
must be updated or a fix must be committed.

False positive with the proposed patch:

 > Balance decreased from $10 to negative value ($-2 approximately)

certainly it is more rare than $n$-th valid case.

>>> If we do deprecate support for $…$, it might also be a good idea to
>>> see if we can add a utility function which would make it easier for
>>> people to migrate existing documents to the new/alternative syntax. For
>>> the same reason it is hard to reliably parse $…$ syntax, we probably
>>> can’t automate that transition, but we should be able to reduce the effort
>>> required to update existing documents.
> 
> Tim, as mentioned before I’m strongly in favour of a ~half decade transition
> including utility functions to shift existing TeX constructs to LaTeX, and
> adding warnings, well before dropping support.

That period should be started when manual is updated.

Functions updating old file to the current syntax is an interesting 
idea, but it assumes a copy of org-element as it was in that old org 
version.