RE: [Axiom-developer] Literate documentation

[Bill Page]

Ralf,

On May 15, 2007 1:50 PM you wrote:
> 
> Yes, of course. But it seemed a bit odd that developers don't
> have a good test bed to cover such simple cases. (How many
> developers are there, by the way?)

This is open source development, remember. It is not always
organized in the optimal way.

At http://sourceforge.net/projects/leo it shows 15 registered
developers.

> 
> What I actually want to have is something as flexible as emacs
> and an IDE as eclipse and an outline (LP) support as LEO and
> good in typesetting as TeX or TeXmacs. Unfortunately there are
> too many different languages involved to join all the efforts.

I think it is possible. For example Leo has a plug-in to allow
Xemacs as an external editor and I have seen examples of the use
of LaTeX code in Leo.

> 
> Why is nobody investigating how to make a eclipse plugin that 
> supports LP and outlining etc? It seem the industry is not
> much interested in LP.


I think there is some interest in this. See:

Literate Formal Software Development with Eclipse
http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~cxl/eig/index.html
also
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~charlie/projects/litprog/ibmEclipse.txt

> 
> >> 1) In contrast to mmm-mode+font-lock in emacs, it doesn't 
> >> highlight the code appropriately, (in particular Aldor and
> >> LaTeX is not supported and I don't know how to fix that).
> 
> > I believe that the language awareness is configurable.
> 
> Of course. But until I am able to program something reasonable
> in python, I tend to keep the good stuff I have.

Python is a very easy language to learn.

> Oh, I've seen that there is an (x)emacs plugin. I haven't yet
> figured out how to start it. Maybe I should download the last
> stable version.
> 

Well, ya... ;-)

Please let me know if you have any problems.

> 
> > No problem. I think "first impressions" are very important.
> 
> Yes. And for psychology tells that it is hard to change the
> "first impression".
> 

True. I expect many people have such "first impressions" of
Axiom and Aldor too...

> ... 
> Ah perhaps you still can help me with a few things. LEO's
> file format is .leo. From that it can tangle code files.
> I have the impression noweb is not involved in this process, 
> since also the input language and semantics as small
> differences. What is LEO's actual realtion to noweb? Can
> I weave to a .nw file or tangle to get a .nw file. I still
> haven't come across that information.
> 

I believe noweb is first of all an external format for Leo.
To get a noweb file from Leo you use export. Leo does however
implement some things that seem motivated by noweb.

Regards,
Bill Page.