[erlang-questions] Speaking of comments

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 17/12/2010, at 7:39 PM, Edmond Begumisa wrote:
>> Well, you _could_ use NuWeb, or NoWeb, or FunnelWeb, and add whatever annotations you like.
>> 
> 
> I've had a look. I like these tools. What I don't like is having to go through a separate generation step to use their output. I think it would be useful to have these sort of rich annotations for *consumption* in Editors/IDEs. To be able to both edit and view them while coding.


I note that Haskell supports both the 'Bird tracks' approach to literate programming (where the
codes is the lines beginning with "> " and the annotation is everything else) and a LaTeX
approach (where the code is in special blocks).  Whether this is done by the Haskell parser proper
or by a separate preprocessing program is really none of the programmer's business.

I don't quite see what you mean by not having rich annotations for consumption in Editors/IDEs.
One edits the annotated document, not the source code alone.  Line numbers in error messages
relate back to the original document, not the source code (this is no different from using
something like Yacc or Happy or Yecc).
> 
> Also, I'm lazy (this is also why I don't use edoc as much as I should.) I just want to start typing rich annotations straight into my editor. I want someone else to take care of the markup.

If you are just typing, it is by definition not rich.  You have to do *SOMETHING* to provide the
extra information in rich annotations, and whether it is markup like `...` or <foo/.../ or gestural
like Cmd-Option-LeftShift-7 makes little difference.