I agree with Mark that literate programming is messed up in Haskell. I
think that it is even worse than he says and hence I don't use it
anymore at all.
Mark P Jones wrote:
> The literate programming conventions using leading '>'s (also known
> as "Bird tracks" or the "inverted comment convention") go back to
> Orwell,
> ...
> This was the only commenting convention in
> Orwell.
It is very interesting that using '>'s was the *only* commenting
convention in Orwell. In contrast Haskell has '>'s and
begin{code}...\end{code}, but also the more conventional -- and {- ...
-}.
As Mark pointed out so clearly, the idea of literate programming is to
have program and documentation in one file and be able to generate
various forms of output from it. You can do this from Haskell programs
that use -- and/or {- ... -} just as well.
The only slight advantages of the inverted commenting conventions are
that they are easier to parse and that they stress the importance of the
comments.
Personally I prefer braces such as begin{code}...\end{code} and {- ...
-} for longer program/comment snippets. So I end up using mostly {- ...
-}.
> (Markup is often required for text too; use whatever seems appropriate
> (and sufficiently general) for the application you have in mind.)
Here is a problem. Which markup language should you use? Latex, because
you want to generate latex documents? A markup language that your
generator tool translates into any other language like latex, html,...?
Cheers,
Olaf
--
OLAF CHITIL,
Dept. of Computer Science, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK.
URL: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~olaf/
Tel: +44 1904 434756; Fax: +44 1904 432767
