Project: evaluate alternative inline cloze syntaxes

[andymatuschak]

Right now, cloze prompts use single curly braces to delimit cloze deletions. This is convenient for typing and pleasant on the eyes, but I'm a bit concerned that this was a short-sighted decision. Curly braces aren't that uncommon! We should consider whether a more unusual delimiter would be a better idea.

Anki uses {{foo}}. I'm not sure what SuperMemo and others use.

Some questions to answer:

• Look through all the primary Markdown "flavors" and key note-taking system extensions (e.g. Roam, Obsidian). What delimiters do they "reserve"? What can we get away with?
• How should the cloze parser behave with respect to code blocks in prompts? These are relatively likely to have curly braces. But you may reasonably want to put cloze deletions in a (small) code block!
• How might we extend the cloze syntax to include features like "grouped" cloze deletions (i.e. two of the blanks are removed at once), cues (i.e. some Madlib-type hint about the "type" of the value, like "year" is displayed near the deletion)?

[qubist]

What delimiters do [key note-taking system] "reserve"?

• Obsidian: [[foo]]
• Roam: [[foo]]

How might we extend the cloze syntax to include features

One place to take inspiration/caution from is Python's f-strings (see "Python f-string format datetime" section and down). They use a colon to separate value and formatting. This works because the colon is a reserved symbol in Python.