Cyrus, Gary, (full disclosure: I'm the Axiom Lead Developer and an old lisper)
If we choose a "standard" markup language I'd strongly vote for literate programming using Latex. Consider what the combination of these standard tools will give you. On the Axiom wiki website (http://wiki.axiom-developer.org) you can run Axiom commands (Axiom is implemented in Common Lisp) directly in the web page (see http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/SandBox). Additionally, if you go to (http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/MathAction) and read the section on MathAction Software you can see that the wiki accepts Latex as input. Axiom is being documented using Literate Programs (LP). You can see an example at http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/WesterProblemSet LP files (called pamphlet files in axiom) are basically just latex files with actual embedded source code. The combination of the wiki accepting/using latex and the fact that the "source code" is now all latex documents give us the power to easily combine web-based documentation with source code documentation using journal-quality tools. In addition we have a prototype of a "drag and drop" interface which allows files to be dragged onto a local version of the website where they will be unpacked, compiled, latex-ed, and added to the system and the site. If common lisp adopted such a plan that used literate programming we would have higher quality documentation and a one-to-one binding of documentation and code. In the long term the documentation is what makes the code useful as it takes a human to maintain and modify it. The noweb tool (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nr/noweb) by Norman Ramsey gives us the ability to combine a high quality documentation tool (latex) and a high quality programming language (lisp) with a high quality wiki implementation (latexwik). Tim _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
