Re: [Chicken-users] ideas

[Peter Keller]

Tony accidentily sent this only to me, when it looks like it should have gone
to the list. 

-pete

----- Forwarded message from address@hidden -----

From: address@hidden
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 15:29:11 +0100
To: Peter Keller <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] ideas

> LaTeX is supported everywhere and has books out there that explain it
> to the ends of the earth. SXML-DSSSL sounds too buzzwordy and feels
> like you'd be fighting with it instead of writing the docs--but that is
> a totally unsubstantiated thought.

Well, given a DSSSL installation (which is the hardest part to get
working) it would probably be very quick to get something decent
working. DSSSL is very powerful, I like it a lot. SXML is about my
favourite XML syntax :-) and I like the idea of having a document as a
tree of data rather than a TeX-style program.

(book ()
  (section ((name "The First))
    (p () "Hello...")))

etc etc.... this is probably why Scribe appeals to me. You can get a
tree of document-fragment objects to manipulate, a bit like DSSSL.

> Scribe looks like a scheme representation of LaTeX. I might be convinced
> that Scribe would be ok, but honestly, LaTeX is really good at describing
> things like manuals for stuff.

Scribe generates LaTeX, HTML, nroff and plain text. I enjoyed using
it.

> are the same(the ')'parenthesis is like the closing \end{itemize}),
> I feel that the "look and feel" of the manual description in Scribe
> gets in the way from actually writing the manual. :)

Heh, I feel exactly the opposite :-) I found using scheme-mode in
Emacs to be very productive using scribe. But that's just me.

> I don't know if the same can be said for scribe,

I'd say so...

> where you HAVE to write the document according to the stricter
> parsing rules of Scribe(as comapred to scribe) before you can even
> see anything at all.

True. But unless you get your LaTeX boilerplate right, you've got the
same problem...

> That said, I'd still use Scribe because it basically is LaTeX, just with a
> worse syntax for the problem domain it is representing->This is PURELY
> a SUBJECTIVE view.

:-)

> How does this handle multiline comments?
> 
> > (define (myfunction foo bar)
> >   "Returns the result of mapping blorch over foo, followed by appending bar"
>       "while sideffecting the qux object."

That's a good suggestion.

Perhaps it could be formalised as: "The docstring of a function is the
concatenation of all the leading elements in the body of a function
that are literal strings, unless the body of a function consists
entirely of literal strings, in which case the docstring is the
concatenation of all but the last literal string."

That takes care of

        (lambda () 'dummy)      ; no docstring
        (lambda () "a")         ; no docstring
        (lambda () "a" "b")     ; docstring "a"
        (lambda () "a" "b" "c") ; docstring "ab"
        (lambda () "a" "b" 'foo "c")    ; docstring "ab"
        (lambda () "a" "b" 'c)          ; docstring "ab"

Tony
-- 
Monkeys high on math -- some of the best comedy on earth
        - Tom Lord, regarding comp.lang.scheme

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