Hello *,
Each layer of syntax brings in extra complications. For example, with the
standard noweb syntax one cannot use << and >> unescaped. When there are
many layers and many things to be escaped by different characters, things
become unreadable. For example, if I want to find all lines with \\ in my
LaTeX file, I have to say
grep \\\\\\\\ foo.tex
because of regex escapes and shell escapes (yes, I know how to write it a
little shorter, but I just wanted to show an example with multi-layes
escapes due to the regex syntax and the shell syntax). Similar things
happen in C strings with regexes, etc. The fewer layers, escapes and
syntaxes, the better.
noweb is (as far as I know) not flexible enough to do axiom-specific
things (like introspection). Such things should be done by axiom
components, like compiler. And it is equally easy to teach it to
understand \begin{chunk}{foo} ... \end{chunk} as the noweb syntax. One
layer less, no need to escape << and >>.
Andrey
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