Hi Keith, many thanks for your explanation.
Now I understand why start/stop in ConTeXt and begin/end in LaTeXt may be different. The audience I intend to address is people that can use a word processor. The less technical the details are, the easier would be the explanation to be understood. Many thanks again for your help, Pablo On 02/04/2014 10:01 AM, Keith J. Schultz wrote: > Hi Pablo, > > Like I mentioned it depends of the paradigm one uses or to be more > expressive: the meta level of discussion. > > To All: please excuse the use of buzz words in the following. > > The start/stop mechanism has a different semio-syntactic usage depending > on the > context (not ConTeXt) it is used in. > > It can be used for : > 1) do command > > 2) usage of format or element > > 3) set a variable as in start/stopbuffer > > This different semantic usage is somewhat unfortunate, but has the > advantage of keeping > the instruction set(syntax) of ConTeXt simple! > > The best nomenclature would be entity, but that is not easy to > understand for the average joe and jane. > > On the other side the start/stop mechanism can be seen, in terms of OO, > a method that is applied to a object > that is passed to. This method is dynamic in that it calls other methods > depending of the type of object passed. > So we are in the middle of the dynamic OO-programming. > If you wish it is a method that is overloaded. > > Note to Hans, Wolfgang, et al: I realize that it is not implemented as > above, but it does reflect the basic concept, > to my knowledge > and its usage in ConTeXt. > > Start/stop is a mechanism that is applied to an element, object, entity. > Depending on the Enity used with it the semantics > of the mechanism is different. > > So it boils down to the fact what kind of audience you are addressing > and what level of knowledge you expect them to have! > > If you care to discuss this topic more in depth we can go off list. > > regards > Keith -- http://www.ousia.tk ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________
