There was a <a href="http://tunes.org/%7Enef/logs/haskell/08.02.20">chat today on #haskell</a>&nbsp; (15:08 to 16:10) about evolving haddock.&nbsp; I&#39;d like to get comments.<br><br>The goal is to get the full functionality of a general purpose, programmer-friendly markup language like markdown.&nbsp; One example is image embedding.&nbsp; Another is friendly links (no visible URL).&nbsp; <br>
<br>The idea is to make a future haddock be a *preprocessor* that generates pandoc&#39;s extended markdown (or some such).&nbsp; Documentation would be mostly markdown, with very few extensions for code documentation (&#39;foo&#39; and &quot;Foo.Bar&quot;, maybe a bit more).&nbsp; Most of the doc would simply be passed through untouched.&nbsp; The code-doc extensions would get rewritten into standard markdown and mixed in with the rest.<br>
<br>Pandoc could then take the generated markdown and produce HTML, LaTeX, DocBoook XML, etc.<br><br>Perhaps there will be ways in which markdown falls short in expressiveness.&nbsp; If so, I&#39;m guessing the shortcomings wouldn&#39;t be specific to the task of code documentation, and so could be approached as improvements to markdown/pandoc (which is written in Haskell).<br>
<br>Since the old and new doc languages would be quite incompatible, we might want to specify in a .cabal file which language to use. <br><br>Reactions?<br><br>&nbsp; - Conal <br>