Re: Request for comments on proposal for literate programming using markdown

On 22/08/12 16:22, Philip Holzenspies wrote:

On 22 Aug 2012, at 16:13, Brandon Allbery wrote:

...

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 4:37 AM, Philip Holzenspies mailto:pkfh@st-andrews.ac.uk> wrote:

So, there are many things people read in the proposal that I didn't want to put in, but the things I very much do want to include get lost in translation also. I wanted to allow the GHC source itself to be written in markdown.

If the existing source tree is using one form of markup, changes and additions should really be consistent with what's already there instead of introducing a new kind of markup. This could actually be *more* disruptive.

The point was that quite a bit of the GHC source has markdown-like things in it, using LaTeX-style code-fencing, but LaTeX-incompatible markup (like underlining section with ~~~~~).

I tend to gently nudge the codebase towards illiterate source whenever I can. This is probably a personal preference, but I haven't been convinced that literate code is worth the effort. I want the code to look its most readable in a text editor, which is where I look at it most. Now, perhaps if I had an editor that rendered the markdown on the fly while syntax-highlighting the code, maybe that would tip the balance. (the editor must be emacs, though). I have nothing against adding the extension you propose to GHC, I'm just not sure that we'll actually want to use it in GHC. Cheers, Simon