Re: Stretchy Operators

At 5:56 PM 7/3/96, Patrick D. F. Ion wrote:
>If you want always to size fences automatically increasingly outward then
>one method has got to be a pairing of fences, and a rule such as alluded to
>above about covering the extreme excursions of any expression nested
>within.  But that leads to things like the TeX dummy \. fences to allow
>balancing, and to difficulties when an "bracketed expression" continues
>over a line.

In my proposal, there is no problem with linebreaks affecting the
matching of brackets, because matching is interpreted by the parser
and linebreaking is an issue only of the renderer.

The proposal doesn't presently include a forced linebreak,
and doesn't yet specify a suggested linebreak, but will do so
in the next draft (as suggested by Dave Raggett). But even if a
suggested linebreak occurs between brackets, this will not affect
matching of brackets by the parser (nor their growing, based on
sizes of the contents, by the renderer -- unless the renderer's
style wants it to affect this).


>In addition there are constructions like the semi-open
>interval notation [a,b) which might have to have explicit pairings added.

In my proposal, all kinds of left brackets match all kinds of right
brackets, whether or not they are of the same type, by default.
So you'd have to add something to *prevent* the brackets in
[a,b) from matching. (One way to prevent matching would be to use <mterm>.)

- Bruce