George Russell writes:
> One further point I want to make. It should not be the purpose of the
> Glasgow Haskell Implementors to solve all the world's programming problems;
> they should focus on providing a good set of Haskell tools. As I think this
> discussion has illustrated, there are a number of high-tech experimental
> literate programming solutions out there, but while they may be flavour-of-
> the-month now, they may be horribly obsolete in 5 years time. Also they
> frequently are only accessible to people using certain operating systems;
> for example, it is already too much trouble for me to compile the Glasgow Haskell
> documentation because it uses DocBook, which only appears to exist on RedHat Linux.
> So I think if the GHC implementors do intend to use some sort of literate
> programming, they should stick to what is simple, well-understood, and easy
> to install on all systems. (unlit.c, for example.) Leave experimenting with
> novel formats to other people.
Just to clarify, I'm not associated with GHC except as a user; whatever the
GHC team wants to use for literate documentation is certainly their
business. I just want to determine what the requirements for a generic Haskell
documentation system would be and, incidentally, I think I already stated that
accessibility (for every Haskell user, on every [uh, OK, every reasonable] OS)
is a must-have. I don't want to force anything on Haskell users; on the
contrary, I want to see a simple and effective documentation system which you
could count on _without_ any special technology.
--
Frank Atanassow, Dept. of Computer Science, Utrecht University
Padualaan 14, PO Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, Netherlands
Tel +31 (030) 253-1012, Fax +31 (030) 251-3791
