Hi Keith, many thanks for your explanation. I cannot see the “structural” difference ;-) between the start/stop and the begin/end pairs. But I think structure is fine. Structural element seems too complex to me. Many thanks for your help again, Pablo On 02/03/2014 10:07 AM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
Hi Pablo,
The start/stop mechanism in ConTeXt is not easy to relate to LaTeX.
As the name indicates it means "start/stop doing 'something' "!
This "something" can be either equivalent to "Command" or "Enviroment" in LaTeX.
e.g: \startbuffer ... \stopbuffer
starts storing "things" in a buffer(aka. Variable). This would be simailar to "command" as you can access the buffer with \getbuffer and \putbuffer. Of course one could argue that it is actually like an LaTeX environment that has a side effect of setting a variable for later use.
On the other side you have \starttable \stoptable which one would put in the realm of LaTeX-environments.
One can practically, use the start/stop mechanism almost anything you define.
Depending on the paradigm that you use structure (and/or) element would be appropriate! That is is a program source the definition of a function/procedure/method is a structure/element of the program. Structure element is not necessarily reserved for data structures!!
Just my two cents worth.
Hope this helps
regards Keith.