Semantically, "an operation [in Scribble] doesn’t care whether it’s used with [...] or {...}." Therefore, it would be useful if Scribble expressions were not syntactically limited to the form @ ‹cmd› [ ‹datum›* ] { ‹text-body› }, and instead allowed text-mode and racket-mode arguments to be freely & indefinitely sequenced.
What I've found using Scribble is that many of the functions one writes are, of course, intended to operate on a text argument. So the text-mode argument naturally wants to come first in the function: @cross-ref{This text} Now, suppose I want to add an optional second argument. The natural place for this optional argument would be after the first: @cross-ref{This text}["where.html"] or @cross-ref{This text){where.html} But AFAIK, Scribble forbids these patterns. So I might try this: @cross-ref["where.html"]{This text} But that doesn't work either, because the cross-ref function expects the target text to be in the first position. So either I must forego idiomatic Scribble expressions altogether: @(cross-ref "This text" "where.html") Or use a keyword argument: @cross-ref[#:destination "where.html"]{This text} As a workaround, that's OK. But at this point, Scribble is reaching up into my code and starting to impose design restrictions (namely, keyword arguments) that have ripple effects elsewhere.
____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users