Re: Deprecate Texinfo commands

[Gavin Smith]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 01:13:12AM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 07:05:17PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > > 
> > > I think that the arguments should be separated by commas both for
> > > consistency and also because we eventually want to allow for spaces in
> > > arguments.  Also I think that it would be much better if the arguments
> > > were semantically defined.  The first argument could be the language,
> > > the second a hint about the size.
> > 
> > Could arbitrarily many arguments be provided?  Are there any other
> > Texinfo commands which are variadic (separating arguments with commas)?
> 
> There are @node and @float, and also @definfoenclose and @pagesizes
> although @pagesizes and @definfoenclose only accept specific arguments.
> Some @-commands do not use commas, but they are very specific (@alias,
> @syn*index, @def*).

Right, I meant an unlimited number of arguments.  @node and @float have
a variable number of arguments as you say.

> > Maybe there won't be any uses for this feature other than source
> > language and size, so it won't matter.  I don't like making size part
> > of the language, though: I thought of this as a hack to be used when
> > you couldn't avoid it, rather than something to be encouraged.
> 
> I agree, I think that we should stick as much as possible to a semantic
> language.  But unless I am missing something the idea here is to cover
> @smallexample use case, so this means making size part of the language.

The main use was to make syntax highlighting easier, even if it wasn't
supported directly.  It could also be used for extracting segments of
code from Texinfo files for some purpose.