Hi,

It seems that during the recent suggestions about what markup to choose (Markdown, Creole, Asciidoc, etc.), we've forgotten about one of the goals that seem very important to me for Haskell: the ability to write math formulas. I have experienced on StackExchange that just adding MathJAX to Markdown leads to many surprising errors that can be fixed only by strange hacks.

Personally I'd incline to choose some existing, well-established markup language with formal specification that supports math (hopefully there is one). Extending Haddock with new features and a syntax for math formulas would certainly require to design such a specification, which isn't easy, and using an existing one would simplify the process a lot. Also I believe that newcomers to Haskell would definitely appreciate working with an existing markup language (and I'm sure not only them) instead of having to learn Haddock's syntax.

Best regards,

Petr

2013/5/2 Mateusz Kowalczyk <fuuzetsu@fuuzetsu.co.uk>

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On 02/05/13 06:57, Ben wrote:
> sorry, i was only trying to make a helpful suggestion!
>
> just to clarify: i'm not championing asciitext (or any other
> format) -- i only heard about it recently in a comment on
>
> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markdown.html
>
> i checked it out and it sounded cool, so i thought it'd be a
> helpful pointer to whomever is working on new haddock -- they are
> of course welcome to ignore it. totally understand that overmuch
> debate is not helpful (though i'm not sure it's fair to call it
> bikeshedding, since it is a primary feature of the proposed
> project!)
>
> best, ben
>
> On Apr 27, 2013, at 2:02 PM, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Ben <midfield@gmail.com> wrote:
>> asciidoc has been mentioned a few times in comments, i think it's
>> worth looking at.
>>
>> This is the problem I was afraid of: for every markup syntax
>> under the sun, someone will come along to champion it.
>>
>> The choice of one or N syntaxes is ultimately up to the
>> discretion of the student, guided by their mentor. It is in our
>> collective interest to avoid prolonging a bikeshed discussion on
>> this, as a long inconclusive discussion risks dissuading any
>> sensible student or mentor from wanting to pursue the project in
>> the first place.
>
>
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>

These two posts are exactly why I believe that extending Haddock
itself would be of more benefit than simply adding a Markdown
extension to it: with addition to core features, integrating any of
the N syntaxes that people want suddenly becomes the question of just
writing reader and writer modules for Pandoc instead of a full project
on marshalling yet another markup as an extension directly to Haddock.

- --
Mateusz K.
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