On May 8, 3:58 pm, "Edward K. Ream" <[email protected]> wrote: > In this thread I'm going to do some blue-sky thinking.
This has been an enjoyable conversation. Many thanks to all who have contributed. Every comment was useful. Here is a summary of my thinking on this topic. 1. Kent's remark about sentinels == niche has been the driving force in my thoughts for 15+ years. I would dearly like to find away around sentinels, but I don't believe that is possible, or even wise in general. Indeed, sentinels are *real* and *essential* data for representing outline structure in external files. Alas, this is an inescapable conclusion. 2. The essence of the problem is that some people do not care about outline structure and the benefits they create. Alas, if people object to sentinels, they are, in effect, making it impossible for those who *want* to share outline structure to do so easily. In particular, neither @shadow nor @auto allow me to share my outline data with you. In short, those who object to sentinels make it impossible to share outline data in external files. Edward P.S. Notes: We can imagine tools (editors and diffs) that hide sentinels from view, but such an approach will likely not be a realistic possibility. @auto and @shadow have their own strengths and weaknesses. @auto is "lighter" and quicker, but it does not support clones nor does it remember organizer nodes: you get exactly what the import code gives you. @shadow is much more capable, but it is slower: Leo must read and write twice as many files. But these tradeoffs are largely irrelevant to this discussion: only by sharing the private @shadow files could people share outline data. In some environments, such as Mathematica, there are no external files. In that case, it's possible to represent outlines (that is Mathematica Notebooks) using something isomorphic to Leo's .leo files. In Mathematica's case the representation is called an expression. Simply adding an id to Cell expression would suffice to represent clones. If Leo never created external files, then .leo files would work just like Mathematica .nb files and there would be no problem. As I was thinking about this problem I realized that one could build in an @shadow-like algorithm to update @nosent files based on diffs. In effect, the data in the .leo file becomes the private file. I see no real advantage to such a scheme, but it is a cute idea all the same. EKR -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor?hl=en.
