Re: [Texmacs-dev] literate programming for TeXmacs

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi Felix and David,

On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 12:19:33PM +0000, Felix Breuer wrote:
> almost a year ago I published a working version of a small literate 
> programming
> system for use with TeXmacs.
[...]
> I started working on a proper plugin for TeXmacs, but then realized that for
[...]

I followed a bit of your discussion.
Let me quickly tell you a few thoughts:

1) I think that source files with TeXmacs comments (a la David) and
   TeXmacs files with special serializing/export (a la Felix)
   are both of independent interest.

2) In both cases, notice that you may wish to override the standard
   load and save routines. Using the contextual overloading mechanism
   this can be done extremely elegantly, just by redefining
   load-buffer/save-buffer in case that the user included a certain
   style package. The overloaded routine would typically do some
   (un)commenting or additional serialization (i.e. generate
   the necessary "source" files when you save your document).

3) The handling of TeXmacs comments in source files should be
   very easy to implement. Something like

        /* TeXmacs 1.0.5.7 markup
        ....
        end TeXmacs markup */

   would probably be a good marker in the case of C/C++ files.

4) For the roadmap after version 1.1, I plan to include an internal
   linking mechanism based on tree obervers. This should be very robust
   and completely outdate the current linking/referencing mechanism,
   mutators and the Proclus plug-in. Also this will allow you to think
   of documents as graphs rather than trees. However, I have no idea when
   I will have time.

5) Independently from me, I think that it would be good to develop
   a "TeXmacs file system" as suggested a month or so ago on this list.
   This should be done in a server based way and the development can be
   done quite independently from TeXmacs itself (Felix: I do strongly
   recommend the use of Scheme). I think that such a file system would
   be of a great help for litterate programming too: it basically
   would consider the file system to be a big document.

Best wishes, Joris