Hi Keith, many thanks for your explanation. Now I understand why start/stop in ConTeXt and begin/end in LaTeXt may be different. The audience I intend to address is people that can use a word processor. The less technical the details are, the easier would be the explanation to be understood. Many thanks again for your help, Pablo On 02/04/2014 10:01 AM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
Hi Pablo,
Like I mentioned it depends of the paradigm one uses or to be more expressive: the meta level of discussion.
To All: please excuse the use of buzz words in the following.
The start/stop mechanism has a different semio-syntactic usage depending on the context (not ConTeXt) it is used in.
It can be used for : 1) do command
2) usage of format or element
3) set a variable as in start/stopbuffer
This different semantic usage is somewhat unfortunate, but has the advantage of keeping the instruction set(syntax) of ConTeXt simple!
The best nomenclature would be entity, but that is not easy to understand for the average joe and jane.
On the other side the start/stop mechanism can be seen, in terms of OO, a method that is applied to a object that is passed to. This method is dynamic in that it calls other methods depending of the type of object passed. So we are in the middle of the dynamic OO-programming. If you wish it is a method that is overloaded.
Note to Hans, Wolfgang, et al: I realize that it is not implemented as above, but it does reflect the basic concept, to my knowledge and its usage in ConTeXt.
Start/stop is a mechanism that is applied to an element, object, entity. Depending on the Enity used with it the semantics of the mechanism is different.
So it boils down to the fact what kind of audience you are addressing and what level of knowledge you expect them to have!
If you care to discuss this topic more in depth we can go off list.
regards Keith