(This may be a bit odd for some of us, but I wanted to pass on a novel innovation)
The latest release of coffeescript has a new Literate "mode": if you use the extension .litcoffee it is also treated as markdown! This is a modern extension to Knuth's Literate Programming: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/lp.html This is likely brought about by the coffeescript docco documentation tool, but now integrated into the coffeescript compiler. I've been imbedding markdown in agentscript for docco use once the project "got real". You can see it here: http://htmlpreview.github.com/?https://raw.github.com/backspaces/agentscript/master/docs/model.html I wasn't sure initially, but now am entirely sold on the approach. For one thing it has been invaluable for discussing the project with other programmers wishing to modify the code. The literate coffeescript announcement is here, with links showing the source in various formats: http://coffeescript.org/#literate As odd as it may seem, I recommend use of similar stunts in all languages that support it. Knuth has quite a following in this area. The idea of markdown comments certainly has a lot of traction. ( Now back to our scheduled .. er.. programming! :) -- Owen Literate CoffeeScript Besides being used as an ordinary programming language, CoffeeScript may also be written in "literate" mode. If you name your file with a .litcoffee extension, you can write it as a Markdown document — a document that also happens to be executable CoffeeScript code. The compiler will treat any indented blocks (Markdown's way of indicating source code) as code, and ignore the rest as comments. Just for kicks, a little bit of the compiler is currently implemented in this fashion: See it as a document<https://gist.github.com/jashkenas/3fc3c1a8b1009c00d9df> , raw<https://raw.github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/master/src/scope.litcoffee>, and properly highlighted in a text editor <http://cl.ly/LxEu>. I'm fairly excited about this direction for the language, and am looking forward to writing (and more importantly, reading) more programs in this style. As *1.5.0* is the first version of CoffeeScript that supports it, let us know if you have any ideas for improving the feature.
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