[fmp-hackers] Re: XML Literate Programming

[Ferenc Wagner]

               Hi Marco,

I also had a look at the DocBook extension for literate
programming. (http://www.west-point.org/users/usma1978/
/36200/LitProg/SGMLWEB/index.htm) As a whole, I like it, but
the &entities; frighten me.  At the source level they make
the code rather unreadable.

> I agree that XML is not a beautiful language.  However, it
> is much more portable than TeX.  (Which is not a beautiful
> language either from the syntactic point of view.)  Syntax
> always sucks.

Personally I find Haskell's syntax beautiful like nothing
else.  And this is what you want to sacrifice to the god of
Portability... ;-(

> No, we could still process the tangled programs with
> lhs2TeX.

With the documentation stripped I can't see the point in it.
Never mind; sometimes I think it's too much of a hassle
anyway.  The code *is* pretty as is, and for somebody not
familiar with the operators' ASCII representation the
symbols are just confusing.  For me they were, at least,
when I first saw FMP code.

> Personally, I would be quite interested to gather
> experience with DocBook and literate programming in
> DocBook, but I understand that it will require some extra
> work compared to the standard, LaTeX-based approach --
> work that perhaps should go to FMP itself.  What do you
> think?

I think we should do what we are interested in.  We are
doing this for fun (mostly), so it's not a real choice
anyway.  FMP is not too bad right now, and good
documentation counts much more than one additional special
purpose extension.  Every user has different needs, that's
why we are using Haskell: everybody can easily put the
pieces together in the way he or she likes.

Perhaps we can even persuade Emacs to do the necessary
substitutions in the code blocks.  This would make me happy,
too :-).  Ah, and one more thing: http://haskell.org/haddock is
something we could use.  I think it could coexist with
DocBook, as it's using inline (not literate) comments.

                                     Feri.