On 2012-03-22 11:38, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> 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.

You’re right, it can cause confusion to people migrating from
Latex where package options, afair, allows mixed key-value/list
syntax (like e.g. Lua does as well). Random example from the
KOMA-Script manual:

  \documentclass[BCOR=12mm,DIV=calc,twoside]{scrartcl}
                 ^^^^^^^^^          ^^^^^^^
                 assignment  …      switch

Therefore the difference to Context deserves mention at least
somewhere in
<http://wiki.contextgarden.net/From_LaTeX_to_ConTeXt>
which said migrators are most likely to consult first.

> - 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 [...,...=...,...]

And while we are handing out reading assignments (pun intended)
here are two wiki links that provide background information:
<http://wiki.contextgarden.net/System_Macros/Comma_Separated_Lists>
<http://wiki.contextgarden.net/System_Macros/Key_Value_Assignments>
Perhaps it makes most sense to think of Comma Lists v. Assignment
Lists in terms of the two different argument parsers being used
to process them.

Regards
Philipp

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