On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 03:01, Kip Warner wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-03-20 at 18:22 -0400, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
>> Anything else will leave to undersirable behaviour (or segfaults :) ) As I
>> had said in one of my earlier emails, this is the case for ALL context
>> macros that take both options and assignments.
>
> Fair enough. I got it to work now with,
>
> \startitemize[R,2*broad][start=11,before=\startlinecorrection,after=
> \stoplinecorrection]
>
> My only concern here is that, for something as incredibly fundamental
> and recurring in the world of ConTeXt, the caveats and distinctions to
> be made between options and assignments, that can and have taken down
> entire operating systems, or cause hour after hour of no end of vague
> syntactical errors, or even successful compilations with the wrong
> effects, shouldn't that probably have been mentioned at least once, even
> if only in passing, somewhere within the 369 page user manual? The word
> "assignment" I couldn't locate once.
- The fact that assignments and simple options have to be separated is
not a limitation of TeX, but the way how ConTeXt is programmed. Hans
uses a single command that takes all options inside brackets at once
that defines (results in) something similar to (syntax is not exact
and is probably completely different in MKIV) \@@itmstart -> 11,
\@@itmbefore -> \startlinecorrection, etc.
- Maybe it could be more explicit, but if you ever take a look at
documentation, for example
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Command/setupitemgroup
you will notice that some brackets are depicted with [...,...] and
others with [...,...=...,...]
- The fact that luatex crashes is simply a bug that should be fixed,
so if you didn't do it already, please add a ticket to the tracker. It
would help a lot if somebody could come up with plain LuaTeX example
that does approximately the same since it might happen that until the
bug gets fixed, Hans might reimplement some functionality and then
LuaTeX won't crash on the same input any more. Lots and lots of bugs
in LuaTeX have been fixed in past, but most of them happened on
regular/proper/allowed input. Not many people use wrong ConTeXt syntax
on regular basis to be able to spot such problems. I also bet that if
somebody else would start writing his own TeX format comparable to
ConTeXt, quite some new bugs might have surfaced that one would never
stumble upon during regular use.
Mojca
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