Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] org-sbe fixes

[Vladimir Panteleev <thecybershadow@gmail.com>]

On 2018-03-25 20:26, Nicolas Goaziou wrote:
>> I think this has been applied to the maint branch, but I cannot find a
>> mention of it in the ORG-NEWS file. Maybe it should be mentioned there
>> as it is a breaking change. For instance,(I had to modify table formulas like

Sorry, I did not intend this to be a breaking change (for any reasonably 
valid use cases).

The problem is that because org-sbe is a macro, it attempts to parse the 
sexpr without evaluating it. The intention was to check what kind of 
lisp object the argument is, and preserve the old behavior if it's a 
string, but do something more sensible if it's a list. I.e. "foo" and 
(identity "foo") are currently treated differently in org-sbe arguments. 
However, it currently can't do that because the actual evaluation occurs 
elsewhere (the sexpr is stringified mostly-as-is into a babel header and 
then parsed as such).

One ugly fix would be to patch over this by checking for some common 
lisp forms that result in a list, such as (list ...) and (quote ...), 
and treat the remaining ones in a backwards-compatible way. However, the 
more time I spend on org-sbe, the more I think that perhaps a better 
approach would be to deprecate org-sbe (or outright remove it, I could 
argue that due to the overwhelming number of flaws its mere presence is 
downright harmful), and replace it with something more sensible: a 
function (not macro) defined somewhere other than ob-table (because it 
is not specific to tables) without any of the crazy string escaping logic.

What do you think?

-- 
Best regards,
  Vladimir