Re: nomarking function in MKIV

[Alan BRASLAU <alan.braslau@cea.fr>]

On Thursday 01 July 2010 12:00:45 Thomas A. Schmitz wrote:
> On Jul 1, 2010, at 11:44 AM, Alan BRASLAU wrote:
> > No one has answered my question about to what belongs any text
> > between a proceding \stopchapter and a following \startchapter, as in
> > \startchapter{title}
> > \stopchapter
> > some text
> > \startchapter{next title}
> > \stopchapter
> 
> Excuse me, but your question is just plain nonsense. What you show us is
> sloppy writing. Why should ConTeXt or any other system cater to this?
> You're asking "where does text belong that doesn't belong to any
> hierarchical structure of my document?" The answer is obvious: this text
> doesn't belong anywhere.

This is a very good answer.

Now, think about robustness. So called sloppy writing
can easily happen in a very big project, or more likely
by an inexperienced user. ConTeXt is pretty good in handling
this, but not perfect. How many times have we tried options
that do not exist and which are simply ignored in silence.

Now try:
  \input knuth
  \starttext
  What about this?
  \stoptext

Sometimes our errors, ignored in silence, end up having
strange side effects that are long to debug. I came across
this, for example, using by mistake \cite{reference}
rather then \cite[reference].

Back to robustness, I once wrote a very big system used to run
expriments. It *had* to be robust. Luckly, to insure this,
I had a collegue who was very good in doing every thing wrong.
For example, if the program asked "how many cycles" to run,
he was capable of typing "yes". Why not?
The program still had to handle this correctly.
Should be the same for typesetting.

I hope that you all *never* make mistakes.
Remember, *real* unix users only use cat;
All other text editors are for "sissys".

Alan
___________________________________________________________________________________
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
___________________________________________________________________________________