Tim,
Your concerns are well founded. Essentially any cosmetic extension
to the org table syntax will be an unmaintainable, bug ridden
nightmare and would be an eternal burden on any attempts to formalize
correct behavior. I have a draft of a grammar for a significant
portion of Org syntax (forthcoming), and getting tables right was
quite hard, despite their seeming simplicity. Any surface syntax level
additions would require updating an unknown number of parts of the
codebase to accommodate the change, since every part of org implements
its own parser (e.g. there is already a bug in the interaction between
tables and #+macro: commands containing the pipe character that
org-export implements incorrectly). Relatively speaking, the potential
approaches discussed in Timothy's previous proposal are much more
likely to be tractable. Best,
Tom
