Re: [Vim-latex-devel] new version of imaps.vim

[Benji F. <be...@me...>]

Srinath Avadhanula wrote:
> This is bad! We have a problem with vim's limitation of only letting
> functions take upto 20 arguments...

      Ouch.  I forgot about that. :-(

> On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Benji Fisher wrote:
> 
> 
>>>NOTE: This is a work in progress. the changed version of Tex_IMAP() is not
>>>yet working quite robustly enought. It is sometimes generating more
>>>arguments than are needed.
>>
>>      Examples?  Maybe my simplified version will work better.
> 
> 
> Thanks for the simplifications!  Turns out the Tex_IMAP() function was
> fine. But the following
> 
> call Tex_IMAP('EPI', "\\begin{picture}(<+width+>, <+height+>)"
>                 \ . "(<+xoff+>,<+yoff+>)\<cr>\\put(<+xoff+>,<+yoff+>)"
>                 \ . "{\\framebox(<++>,<++>){<++>}}\<cr>\\end{picture}<++>",
>                 \ 'tex')
> 
> creates more than 20 arguments!

      Just barely...

> Now what? A long term solution to this problem is ofcourse changing vim
> to be more script friendly and accept more than 20 arguments (Its bad
> that there are limitations in the first place!). But I suspect that Bram
> will most probably ask us to use some hack to get around the limitation
> rather than change things... And even if he does change it, it will be
> bad to make latex-suite depend on the very latest vim being installed.

      The last point is a good one.  No, we have to find a way with vim 
as it is.

> So... Whats the hack around it?
> 
> Maybe if IMAP() is called with the same LHS more than once, it appends
> this RHS to the previous RHS? Then change Tex_IMAP() to call
> IMAP() with chunks of 20 arguments each time? This is sad... A simple
> function getting needlessly complex.

      Too complex.  Maybe we should abandon the variable-argument idea 
and go back to the drawing board.  How about

:fun! IMAP(lhs, rhs, ft, ...)

compatible with the original, but allowing optional place-holders?  In 
other words, use the calling pattern that you came up with for Tex_IMAPS().

> I'll let others think about it / implement it :)
> 
> About imaps... For sometime I have been thinking of having IMAPS() take
> a flag which makes it "safe", i.e if the user defines other mappings
> with the same LHS before latex-suite, it will not override his
> mappings... Now the flag argument could also be useful for telling us
> whether this is part of an append or an entirely new RHS... The flag
> cannot be optional. It will have to be left as '' if we just want it to
> overwrite like now.

      I think that this should be implemented by a variable, 
[bg]:Imap_noclobber or some such.  The user is not going to change all 
the calls to IMAP() in the latex-suite files.

>>      Can you test this?  It might be a solution to the remaining
>>encoding problems.
>>
>>:let foo = "\xab"
>>:echo iconv(foo, "latin1", &enc) =~ foo
> 
> Yes. This seems to echo 1 with encoding set to both 'latin1' and
> 'utf8'...

      Good.  According to the docs, iconv() should always be able to 
convert between utf-8 and latin1.  That is almost as good as knowing 
that we can convert between these and &enc.

> Another thing to note: There seem to be a lot of patches in vim 6.0
> towards MB chars... Therefore, maybe we should only test on vim 6.0 w/o
> patches henceforth, so we have the safest...

      I guess I should boot into W95 from time to time.  I have an 
unpatched 6.1 there; I could install an unpatched 6.0 as well...

					--Benji