On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Hans Hagen wrote:
On 2/19/2013 8:36 AM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
Hi All,
In a way, it is correct that for compatibility reasons and and convert it is good to keep the old syntax.
Yet, ConTeXt is suppose to be more natural.
I consider the \{ \} \| etc to be escapes for tex characters. In fact, if one wants || in math then it's more natural to support || directly.
Except that braces actually need an escape, while bars don't. I don't see any advantage of "\|" representing a single vertical bar, it only breaks compatibility and helps confuse those who used "\|" in other flavours of TeX. There is a nice thread on SX: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498/mid-vert-lvert-rvert As others have already written, one should use the appropriate unicode character, not two bars. (Two bars are a separate symbol - I guess that you probably don't want to recognise two subsequent bars are replace them with a different glyph?) And even then there is a problem with typographical conventions: whether the symbol is used as left/right delimiter, as a binary operator, ... Mojca