After a longish while of inactivity, I finally got around to finishing the draft spec of a next-generation protocol for Poliqarp, the be-all-end-all corpus concordance tool that I maintain. The spec is being written in LaTeX, and it has a number of subsections that describe particular methods of the protocol. Each one of those is further divided into sub-subsections that describe the method’s signature, purpose, syntax of request, syntax of response, and an optional example. I thought to write a couple of macros to help me separate the document’s logic from details of formatting, so that I could say:

So, there. Inspired by the newly-started blogs of some of my acquaintances, I had this thought that I might actually have a word or two on a number of subjects, and that it might even be worth sharing. And here I am, typing this introductory entry in my Emacs.