Simon Peyton-Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I realise belatedly that my message might have sounded > dismissive. My apologies; it wasn't intended to be. Good > ideas are just that: good. Reinventing them is a sign of > good taste. > > As to documenting GHC, we try to do that by writing papers. > That's easy to motivate because we get research brownie > points for papers.
One of the irritating effects of this process is not that the reports are research papers, but that they are on-line sporadically and only very rarely html. The overhead of having to download a big file (or search through one's own copies) and fire up some other viewer (for .ps or .pdf) -- or worse find a printed copy or fork out £55.97 to read something online) is a significant obstacle when all one wants to do is to is check the syntax of something or look up a short bit of code. A hyperlink of the form <a href="http://.../long-research-paper.html#interesting-paragraph";> interesting bit</a> is far more useful than one of the form <a href="http://.../long-research-paper.pdf";>look for section 49.7.3</a>. It may not seem significant, but when one is attempting to learn some new part of Haskell it's really off-putting. -- Jón Fairbairn [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
