Re: Deprecate Texinfo commands

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 07:07:24AM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> 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.

Nothing with an unlimited number of arguments, but nothing prevents us
from implementing it, should not be difficult.

> > > 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.

I understand that, and actually I had a look, in the past, at syntax
highlighting and using source-highlight for example to replace html in
@example and similar, using code similar to the code used for
tex4ht/latex2html, but a language specification was missing.  Now it
should be much easier to do.

-- 
Pat