On Wed, 8 Sep 1999, Andy Gill wrote:
> Literate Haskell is simply a way of including comments.
> Javadoc attaches meaning to stylized comments,
> such that the tool can produce annotated indexes.
>
> The two concepts are orthogonal.
They are only sort of orthogonal. Another approach that combines literate
Haskell, with the javadoc thing you are talking about is to define an
XML schema for representing Haskell code and comments.
You can then make arbitrarily interesting transformations of source +
comments using either HaXML or XSL. (applying XSL to this system
gives you a programmable pre-processing, documentation, and
packaging/instalation system for free!)
<Haskell>
<function>
<description>this function keeps your pants up</description>
<keywords>
<keywork>catamorphism</keyword>
<keyword>blah</keyword>
<spec>x=y</spec>
<impl>fun x y=zip x y
</impl>
</function>
I don't know how you handle > and < sanely within the source, but
using XML as the format for editing Haskell source means that you can use
an XML editor/outliner to organize and browse which in some cases, can be
really helpful... It also means that all sorts of self-documenting
meta-information can be added sanely later. (You can also use the
XML-schema spec as a formalism for this spec.
-Alex-
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