[racket] scribble syntax suggestion wrt text-mode and racket-mode arguments

Perhaps I'm overlooking some obvious complication. But today, the pattern
of how Scribble parses @ ‹cmd› [ ‹datum›* ] { ‹text-body› } is roughly
"apply <cmd> to the list formed by concatenating the datum arguments and
the text-body arguments". So it seems to me that this pattern could be
logically extended to cover any number of datum or text-body blocks.

For instance, today, this expression:

@foo[1 2]{3
4}

expands to:

(foo 1 2 "3" "\n" "4")

Therefore, this expression:

@foo{3
4}[5 6]

would expand to

(foo "3" "\n" "4" 5 6)

And this:

@foo[1 2]{3
4}[5 6]{7
8}

To this:

(foo 1 2 "3" "\n" "4" 5 6 "7" "\n" "8")

If you needed a text body to become a single argument, you would just do
what you do today, which is add another set of braces to produce a sublist.
So this:

@foo{@{3
4}}[5 6]

Would become:

(foo ("3" "\n" "4") 5 6)

You could also convert the sublist back into a string with string-join. But
again, that's consistent with current behavior, so NBD.





On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 6:14 PM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu>wrote:

> But a block of text does not always turn into a single argument, so I'm
> not sure how to do what you ask.
>
> Robby
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 7:05 PM, Matthew Butterick <mb.list.acct at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Semantically, "an operation [in Scribble] doesn’t care whether it’s used
>> with [...] or {...}." Therefore, it would be useful if Scribble expressions
>> were not syntactically limited to the form @ ‹cmd› [ ‹datum›* ] {
>> ‹text-body› }, and instead allowed text-mode and racket-mode arguments to
>> be freely & indefinitely sequenced.
>>
>> What I've found using Scribble is that many of the functions one writes
>> are, of course, intended to operate on a text argument. So the text-mode
>> argument naturally wants to come first in the function:
>>
>> @cross-ref{This text}
>>
>> Now, suppose I want to add an optional second argument. The natural place
>> for this optional argument would be after the first:
>>
>> @cross-ref{This text}["where.html"]
>>
>> or
>>
>> @cross-ref{This text){where.html}
>>
>> But AFAIK, Scribble forbids these patterns. So I might try this:
>>
>> @cross-ref["where.html"]{This text}
>>
>> But that doesn't work either, because the cross-ref function expects the
>> target text to be in the first position. So either I must forego idiomatic
>> Scribble expressions altogether:
>>
>> @(cross-ref "This text" "where.html")
>>
>> Or use a keyword argument:
>>
>> @cross-ref[#:destination "where.html"]{This text}
>>
>> As a workaround, that's OK. But at this point, Scribble is reaching up
>> into my code and starting to impose design restrictions (namely, keyword
>> arguments) that have ripple effects elsewhere.
>>
>> ____________________
>>   Racket Users list:
>>   http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/attachments/20130609/21d77a0e/attachment-0001.html>