Re: Org Syntax Specification

[Sébastien Miquel]

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