{source}, {code} and {sourcecode}

Question

I brought that topic up before, but to make matters worse, we now have sourcecode too (in addition to source and code). I'd suggest recombining these three tags into two tags: One for the source code of various TeX related programs/packages and one for inclusion of source code into documents (or are there more potential uses for these tags).

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I am just an occasional visitor here, but I thought I should take the time to revive this discussion and provide a readers point of view:

The code tags are a mess.

I was looking for interesting questions regarding source code formatting and highlighting within latex documents. I came across sourcecode, but realized soon that most of these questions (but not all) were about the latex source code itself, not the inclusion of source code in documents.

So I noticed there is a tag code. That has to be it, right? Because what else could that be. But for some reason it seems to be exactly the same as sourcecode and all the questions are about the latex source.

Many questions are tagged one of the both, some even both. But I still haven't found a tag for the inclusion of source code yet. :)

I don't want to tell you regulars how to run your site, but I think it would be helpful to clean up these tags, define clearly which tag is for what and then put a clear description in the tag wiki, pointing users to the other tags if that was not the tag they are looking for.

Answer 2

We really need three tags:

1. syntax is currently often used to talk about Tex's eyes and mouth, and how to get Tex code there. E.g., How to escape the & (ampersand) character in BibTeX?;
2. We have some questions about the Latex and Plain Tex sources, which I don't see much of a tagging pattern. E.g., Where is \textunderscore defined ?. The sole question of sourcecode is of this type;
3. And then we have syntax highlighting questions, which find themselves under highlighting, syntax, code, and source. E.g., How can I highlight some lines from source code?

syntax and source are the least consistently used tags, and should be avoided. By contrast, everyone seems to figure out how to use highlighting, so I think that should be the destination tag for the type-3 questions.

sources seems a less ambiguous tag name for type-2 questions than sourcecode or source, so I recommend that.

I don't know about the eyes and mouth questions, except to say that I think syntax is not working well. Would eyes+mouth be too confusing for beginners? I guess it would.

The other tags should then be synonyms for these. I don't care too much about which is which, except that we might pay attention to how these tags are used in SO-questions tagged latex.

Answer 3

a major package for highlighting source code is listings, which has its own tag but looking at https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/listings suggests that typically those q/a are not tagged with any more general "source code tag" at all. (and the same if you look at minted tag) which suggests that a simple improvement would be to put a link to listings minted and fancyvrb into the highlighting or code tag wikis (otherwise it would need a "bulk tag edit" to tag anything with listings and minted tags with a "parent" source or code tag