Re: Schemey markup (was Re: Doc Tasks)

[Michael Livshin <mlivshin at bigfoot dot com>]

[ warning: this is a "me too" post ]

Greg Harvey <Greg.Harvey@thezone.net> writes:

> > > A better approach that could keep all of us happy :) might be to
> > > define a simple set of tags that'll handle any formatting we might
> > > want for docstrings.
>
> A few more things that occurred to me:
>
> [ snipped all of them ]

I whole-heartily agree, except for one small point: you probably don't
want to use bare parens to denote markup.  texinfo's @{...} thingies
are pretty nice on the eyes and fingers, though.

I think it's very important to devise Guile-specific markup to use in the
doc-strings, for two purposes:

1. so that everyone is happy because nobody's won. ;)

2. so that there's no friction between Guile's concepts and markup
   language's predefined tags.  I want @{hook ...}, @{method ...},
   @{fluid ...} etc.  (OK, so you could define XML DTD for Guile docs.
   fine, then it'll be easier to target for Guile-markup -> XML
   translator).

3. not really a separate point, but something to consider: it's bad to
   chase trends.  even good ones.  period.  technology trends are the
   world's way to get you to depend on irrelevant considerations of
   other people.  it is worth to maintain your independence,
   especially when it doesn't cost much, and in the case of Guile
   doc-strings it doesn't.

> Gregh: the artist formerly confused with Greg Badros :)

--mike

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