On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 09:21, Martin Drautzburg
Is literate programming something you guys actually do (I only know that Paul Hudak does), or is it basically a nice idea from days gone by?
I use it occasionally for large projects -- its usefulness seems to be strongly related to how complex / large the codebase is. About 1000 SLOC of code (disregarding constants, comments, etc) is my personal tipping point.
In case you do, then how do you do it? Do you use lhs2TeX or what? Do you use "bird" style of full-blown LaTeX?
I've experimented with LHS, NoWeb, and NuWeb. LHS is useless -- you can achieve the exact same effect with standard comments. I can't figure out why it exists. NuWeb is nice, but immature -- I had trouble getting it to generate correct output without jumping through hoops. NoWeb is my current preference for literate programming with Haskell. I'm writing my own preprocessor, designed for Haskell, though it's more of a "something to avoid washing the dishes" project than a "this will ever be released or useful" project. All commentary is marked up with LaTeX. I suppose you could use reStructuredText or HTML, but LaTeX has better support for embedding maths. Something to note is that Cabal really can't handle literate programming well. Its preprocessor support assumes a 1:1 correspondence for generated files, which is not present in any non-trivial project. This can be worked around by using Make to run the preprocessor, and distributing the generated files in Hackage tarballs.
Does any of you use leksah? I failed to see any support for literate programming in leksah. It candies the backslashes in e.g. \documentclass{article} to λdocumentclass{article}.
I've tried using Leksah, but it doesn't display tabs, which obviously makes formatting rather difficult / impossible. I wonder how anybody can use it -- do they just use spaces and avoid indenting completely? GEdit and Vim both work well.