Original-Via: uk.ac.ed.aiai; Tue, 4 Feb 92 17:26:28 GMT
I think people are asking too much of a literate style. In my
opinion it is useful when writing programs with more comments than code.
In such situations, it is important to be able to distinguish comment lines
and code lines without having to look at their context. This can
be done either by placing a symbol at the start of each comment line,
or placing a symbol at the start of each code line. When there are
more comments than code, the latter approach produces less "noise".
I have no trouble distinguishing most comment lines from most
code lines without the annoying "". In the cases where a comment
looks very much like code, I don't think the usual LaTeX approach
of \begin and \end commands is very hard to understand.
For this reason I think that a literate style should be part of the
language.
In any case, you can write a program to process the "" lines
rather than having it be part of the language.
Of course, there may be _other_ reasons for making them part of
the language.
