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Comment by kissgyorgy | Hacker News Reader

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kissgyorgy

This is not plain text. Plain text by definition is plain. It's like calling LaTeX plain text.

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Calculist is plain text in the same way that markdown is plain text. Calculist is not WYSIWYG.

That's why Calculist is not actually plain text. Markdown is not plain text!

> Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text

> Markdown, the simple and easy-to-use markup language

> Markdown's syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web

It's formatted text or also called rich text.

It can be compiled to HTML and when viewed in a suitable viewer could be considered rich text, but markdown files are plaintext. Code sourcefiles are also plaintext. However, I think there should be another term (clean text?) that refers to text abscent of symbols which represent the markup. It would aid in conversation. For instance you might want to parse an HTML formatted document and be left with just the words and certain punctuation, or clean text (or something).

If code source files are plain text, I'm a bacteria.

Hi, Couldn't try as download wasn't available but seems like a great tool from reading other comments. Btw, the GitHub sources are 4 years old and so is the latest release; Are you renewing the project again?

I'm currently brainstorming a notes platform for second order thinking[1], Say like a community submitted scenarios for second-order, third-order thinking. Would Calculist be a good fit for such notes?

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/263-plan-second-order-third-ord... (Disclaimer: My platform)

In the more distant past, when we didn't have a lot of "markup formats", "plain text format" just meant the opposite of "binary format", where "plain" was just emphasising its human readability. But I wrote my first BASIC program around the age of 7, in 1984 and the first and shortly after learnt Forth on a ZX Spectrum. So that's my perspective.

We wrote programs, which controlled a Roland DG DXY-880. That also used a plain text programing language.

I was not speaking a lot of English at that time, so mirror translating back from Hungarian, we said, "textual format" or "plain, textual format" ("síma, szöveges formátum"), to contrast its simplicity with binary formats.

(I was born and raised in Szeged though, so that could be just our regional dialect. How about you?)

I'm not sure I like the analogy as a proof this can't be plain text; my professors and I would often use LaTeX snippets when communicating over plain-text mediums like e-mail -- not to later render into something nicer, but left as-is since it fit the problem domain well and allowed us to quickly communicate ideas that needed some degree of precision. Even if you're firmly in the "code can't be plain text" camp I think you'll agree that LaTeX used in that fashion still counts.

Interesting edge case, this one. Rich text is commonly called that because there is a GUI editor that transparently converts the markup to different styles.

However, that clearly doesn’t apply to markup that is common enough to become a medium of communication.

Then, the question is, where to draw the line? One could argue that markdown only provides minimal semantic structure, and as such is akin to punctuation, which hasn’t always existed in ”plain text”, either.

I think some new categories are needed. Effectively, the standard ones would be something like:

1. Unstructured text: edited and viewed in plain text editor, formatting limited to whitespace

2. Rich text: edited and viewed in GUI editor with unconstrained structured and unstructured formatting

3. Structured text: markdown, LaTeX, etc. Edited as plain text with minimal markup, viewed by rendering source document in GUI, with automatic formatting based on structure and chosen style

4a. Program code, human-written and -readable

4b. Program code, automatically generated (JS bundles, etc)

5. Machine code as binary

You are correct, my thread neighbours and the article are not. The definitions (compatible with Unicode §2.2) are:

1. Plain text: text without mark-up

2. Code and formatted/rich text (e.g. LaTeX, CSV, Markdown, HN comment): text with mark-up or conforming to a grammar with attached semantics.

3. binary (e.g. an ELF executable)

Thus, representations such as SGML, RTF, HTML, XML, wiki markup, and TeX, as well as nearly all programming language source code files, are considered plain text. The particular content is irrelevant to whether a file is plain text. For example, an SVG file can express drawings or even bitmapped graphics, but is still plain text.:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_text

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