[Doc-SIG] Re: Oscar - pre-announcement over on Types-SIG

[David Goodger]

Tony J Ibbs (Tibs) <tony@lsl.co.uk> wrote on 2001-08-23 04:04:
> Sorry - I wasn't precise enough.

No, you were, *I* wasn't ;-)

> What I was trying to say was:
>=20
> Do we care if we have two forms with different meanings which only
> differ in whether the colon is preceded by a space or not - i.e., that::
>=20
> term : classifier
>=20
> has a radically different meaning than::
>=20
> term: classifier
>=20
> (the former is a term and classifier, the second is just a word followed
> by a colon).

I think the ' : ' syntax is natural, and unlikely to occur accidentally.
Escpecially not in the one context where it's to be recognized: definition
lists. So, to answer your question directly: we do care, but not too much,
and it will be documented.

I just took a look through the archives, and saw an earlier reference to
just this sort of thing, on 2000-02-08, by Edward Welbourne (Subject: Re:
[Doc-SIG] Cross-reference proposal). His proposal was to use ' ! ' as the
delimiter. It turns out that I replied to the ongoing discussions at the
time, in my first posting to the Doc-SIG (Subject: [Doc-SIG] Docstring: a
newbie's two bits), suggesting ' : ' instead. Interesting to read one's
opinions so far (18 months!) back and see how far we've come. And "plus =E7a
change, plus c'est la m=EAme chose".

--=20
David Goodger    goodger@users.sourceforge.net    Open-source projects:
 - Python Docstring Processing System: http://docstring.sourceforge.net
 - reStructuredText: http://structuredtext.sourceforge.net
 - The Go Tools Project: http://gotools.sourceforge.net