Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Leo Literate Programming
Delightful to know that eXtenDE is still on someone's lips. (01)
(Actually, my only interest in the project was in understanding
how to do literate-style programming with source code in XML.
I got closer to solving that problem, but never had the time to
spend on the more ambitous goals that Warner advanced. So
the facts that it continues to linger on is something of an
embarrassment -- I confess to investigating Leo with the hope
that I could give it an unqualified recommendation, and shut
down eXtenDE with a pointer to it!) (02)
"Dennis E. Hamilton" wrote: (03)
> Nice critique, Eric. I share your observations about always imparting
> information and having the structure be apparent. I haven't looked at
> Literate Programming enough, and not recently, to see how that is handled
> generally, if at all. I remember when I first read the TeX documentation
> that I found something distracting about it.
>
> With regard to something like conditional structure, I think you may be
> pointing out something that may be difficult for Literate Programming to
> deal with, and that is when the semantics of the exposition and the program
> structure are similar or super-imposed. That is, when program logic becomes
> part of the exposition logic. I am not sure there is a clean way to control
> this by other than some manually-applied hack. I don't recall any
> discussion of this case, yet I would think it crops up a lot. I will keep
> my eye out for anything that is available on this.
>
> Nonetheless, Leo seems valuable to explore further.
>
> I am accustomed to the Python style, and enjoy it (as I do Peter Landin's
> indentation styles), but it is painful if you are generating code from
> another program, too! Something canonical like an XML structure has been my
> way of dealing with that, if it is where I have anything to say about it.
> (Shades of exTenDE! ;)
>
> -- Dennis
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org
> [mailto:owner-ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org]On Behalf Of Eric Armstrong
> Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2002 18:56
> To: ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org
> Subject: Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Leo Literate Programming
>
> Oh, yeah. This could be *big*. Maybe even BIG.
>
> Two major points:
> * Python depends on indentation to define nesting. But indentation
> can be hard to keep consistent in a text file, especially when you
> move things around.
>
> [ ... ]
>
> * Personally, I've never had much use for the "header is different
> from the body" style of outlining. But when the header is a
> readable comment, I might relax that position.
>
> Personally, I would still rather see this style, which is reflective
> of the way Augment was implemented:
> + header<nl>
> body of header (if any)
> + subheader<nl>
> body of subheader
>
> where the header is just the first line of the entry. That makes it
> possible to put in a multi-line comment, for example, where the first
> line captures the essence, and subsequent lines expand on it.
> (I think that style is better whenever multi-line comments are the
> norm, as in Java's API comments.)
>
> [ ... ] (04)