Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[Peter Flynn]

On 18/06/2020 17:20, Chris Green wrote:
[...]
> But why do either?  There are far better ways of doing it, e.g.:-
> 
>      They were playing //La Cantatrice Chauve// last night.
> 
> It's easier to type, it's easier to read, it sort of tells you what's
> intended.  ... and it's "machine readable". 

I perhaps didn't explain enough. Yes, double slashes for italics is OK, 
if all you want is italics. It's identical to <i>...</i>. But it falls 
at the first fence if what you really need to know is that it's the 
title of a play because that information simply isn't present. These are 
documents being stored for posterity: like a publisher's back catalog, 
you should be able to come back to them in a century and still be able 
to extract the information accurately because the method is documented, 
and not dependent on anyone's ephemeral software.

Plus, documents use italics for lots of things (at least a dozen at the 
last count). How is a machine supposed to distinguish between the title 
of a play and a foreign phrase like //ad hoc// or even simple 
//emphasis//. Not everyone even represents emphasis in italics any more: 
many publications use bold nowadays, or a different colour.

> Why should we (weak beings) have to go through the convolutions of
> bracketing 'commands' 

I hope no-one does (except Liam :-). You point and click. You don't see 
anything except that the phrase suddenly becomes italicised. What 
happens behind the scenes is more interesting, however.

> to tell the (mindlessly clever) machine what we mean when a bit more
> work on the machine's part will save our fingers and brains?
Absolutely. Within limits, we shouldn't have to. There are ways for 
detecting user intent in editing interfaces: they just need to be 
implemented. There's nothing to stop you writing a system which will 
spawn a subtask when you type //La Cantatrice Chauve// and go off to see 
if it's a known foreign phrase, the title of a work, or the name of a 
genus and species, or any one of the other reasons for italics.

But most people believe all they want is italics, and that's fine too.

P