Re: Org mode and Emacs

[David Masterson]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:

> David Masterson <dsmasterson@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>>> Semantic/Bovine ??
>>>
>>> Org is not context-free.
>>
>> But could it be moved in that direction? (ie. Organice)
>
> I don't think so. It is motivated by the fundamental Org syntax design,
> AFAIU. (mostly by first match wins design). We are not going to change
> fundamentals of the Org syntax. It will break backward compatibility.

Could Org be moved toward a "well-defined" grammar that could be
separated from the Emacs implementation to allow other systems (iOS,
Android, Windows) to implement (at least part of) a "standard" Org?
Could the backward compatibility be covered by an Emacs library where
necessary? 

>>> Also, Org maintaners previously rejected the idea of implementing Org
>>> parser not in Elisp. Mainly because it would limit the ability to
>>> maintain and contribute to Org - one would need to learn another
>>> programming language to alter anything in Org syntax.
>>
>> Hmmm. That would make it difficult to keep the language "parseable" by a
>> different parser.  Elisp would not provide the checks for (say) keeping
>> the language context-free.
>
> At this point, we are trying to "freeze" Org syntax as much as possible.
> So, major changes are not expected. Different parsers should not suffer
> from future changes (if they do, we should not make those changes to
> start with).
>
> As for keeping checks, we do have a set of parser tests using ERT. So,
> major breakage will be prevented. On top of this, we plan to make the
> parser tests more friendly to third-party tools:
> https://orgmode.org/list/87fsqzi4tw.fsf@localhost

This sounds good.

-- 
David Masterson