18 Feb
2020
18 Feb
'20
6:28 p.m.
Rich Morin <rdm(a)cfcl.com> wrote:
Lately, I've been using the built-in
documentation tools for Elixir,
a functional programming language based on the Erlang VM and a lot
of Ruby syntax. I'm pleased to say that it's really quite pleasant.
I create multi-line "attributes" using macros such as @doc. These
are encoded using Markdown, which isn't perfect but seems adequate.
The results are converted into both HTML pages and interactive help
text, with automagical indexing.
This sounds something like a poor man's version of Literate Programming,
invented by Donald Knuth for TeX et al.
That's another technology that I happen to like personally, but
which never became mainstream. More's the pity (IMHO).
(I do know about Doug's review of DEK's program in the Programming
Pearls column. I think the problems there were not with Lit Prog
itself, but with how Knuth programs. My own take on Literate Programming
can be seen at https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/texiwebjr.)
Yes, probably getting off topic, too.
Arnold