Re: lisp blocks

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

Thank you Karl,

> On Jan 26, 2020, at 8:32, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:

> By the way, there is nothing that actually enforces @lisp contents being
> Lisp code. It could be anything. @lisp is a synonym for @example.

Yes, I noticed that. But it is nice to see that there originally was an 
intention behind the fact that only Lisp was specified as a language.

> By the way 2, I don't understand your original point. @lisp output in
> the PDF is indented, relative to the left margin, in both PDF and Info
> output.

As I replied to Eli earlier, most of the prose about Lisp insists on the fact 
that Lisp is much more readable with proper indentation. There is a huge 
cognitive benefit in having

(defun subst (x y z)
  (cond ((atom z)
         (cond ((eq z y) x)
               ('t z)))
        ('t (cons (subst x y (car z))
                  (subst x y (cdr z))))))

instead of

(defun subst (x y z)
(cond ((atom z)
(cond ((eq z y) x)
('t z)))
('t (cons (subst x y (car z))
(subst x y (cdr z))))))

Since emacs/emacs lisp/texinfo basically come from the same people, I was kind 
of expecting that they had thought of some way to enforce some sort of 
"natural" lisp indentation in the texinfo output.

Org code blocks seem to provide such a feature (although I understand org and 
texinfo are not the same thing) so that only added to my expectation.


Jean-Christophe Helary
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http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune