Hi all,
I have seen many systems used backends for the literate part of a literate
Haskell source file. There is the old literate system from GHC (now dead?),
straight HTML, straight TeXinfo, straight LaTeX, {Wiki,Smug,No,Funnel,...}web
and many personal LaTeX style files or programs which usually end up
converting to LaTeX and/or HTML and sometimes do some pretty-printing of the
code.
Now, I agree that (the freedom of, and potential for :) diversity is a good
thing, and it is nice that Haskell's literate syntax is flexible enough to
support all these things and more, but nevertheless it would be nice if there
were some de facto standard, something well-suited to documenting Haskell
programs, and which at least provides a straightfoward way of producing LaTeX
and HTML (or XHTML, or XML when we get there...). Something that we could put
up on haskell.org and point to in a pinch. Preferably something written in
Haskell that the Haskell community could maintain itself.
Are there any candidates? Any thoughts on this? Am I the only one who is a
little annoyed at having to consider what literate format to use each time I
start an .lhs file in a new project? I know that different people will have
different needs (people who need to embed formulae in their docs, or want to
publish the source file as an article, say, will still want to use straight
LaTeX), but I still think it would be useful to have a default choice.
It seems to me that whatever system ends up getting used for the
"Documentation of standard Haskell libraries" (see the Haskell wish list)
http://www.pms.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/haskell-wish-list/items.php3?id=13
might be a good starting point, since that would provide a fairly good acid
test (although I realize there is actually no need for the Haskell libraries
to be literate themselves).
What do you all think?
--fa(c)
