eho@bogey.Princeton.EDU (Eric Y.W. Ho) (05/28/89)
Does anyone out there knows or heard of when Emacs 19 (the one the supports rich text -- i.e. one that supports fonts, underlining, highlighting, & other graphical goodies interactively (i.e. if you don't like the font or whatever you can change it at once and you see the change straightaway) is coming out ? It'll be nice of course if the underlining framework is general & simple enough such that others can add their only graphical goodies or perhaps more importantly, others can integrate interactive typsetting stuff on top of Emacs (e.g. your colleague sent you a paper in *roff, tex/latex or texinfo and you can bring it up into an Emacs buffer as typsetted text (i.e. you'll see the paper all formatted) and if you want to add a sentenace then you just position your cursor and type in whatever you want and you see the changes at once on screen and when you finish, you just email the whole thing back as *roff or *tex to your colleague who then can further review your comments/additions -- that is Emacs will do the conversion automatically and you don't even need to know/learn *roff or *tex). Also, is anyone extending texinfo where it can integrate code as well -- i.e. you do your coding much like you write a paper (i.e. different pieces of ideas/paragraphs/code-segments relates to other pieces of ides/paragraphs/code-segments) except that now you're documenting your ideas & writing code at the same time and when you've finished, you just run the whole thing through some converter/filter and it'll churn out pure code (be they in Lisp, C or whatever) on the one hand and typesetted documentation for you designs on the other hand. Then, you just continue to test the generated code. This will be really useful as it integrates a lot of things in a nonlinear way -- especially when you're building a somewhat complicated system and others new to your group have to understand it fairly quickly (it'll also help you as the system author too -- in lots of ways, from documentating your ideas/code to further debug/improve your system). Eric Ho Princeton Cognitive Science Lab., Princeton University email = eho@phoenix.princeton.edu voice = 609-987-2819 -- regards. -eric-
kim@watsup.waterloo.edu (Kim Nguyen) (05/30/89)
In article <EHO.89May27213128@bogey.Princeton.EDU> eho@bogey.Princeton.EDU (Eric Y.W. Ho) writes:
Also, is anyone extending texinfo where it can integrate code as
well --
[...] now you're
documenting your ideas & writing code at the same time and when
you've finished, you just run the whole thing through some
converter/filter and it'll churn out pure code (be they in Lisp, C
or whatever) on the one hand and typesetted documentation for you
designs on the other hand.
Eric Ho
Princeton Cognitive Science Lab., Princeton University
email = eho@phoenix.princeton.edu voice = 609-987-2819
Generating "documentation" from the comments in your code is a
somewhat brain-damaged way of describing your programs usefully. Good
documentation consists of high-level descriptions, followed by
increasingly detailed nitty-gritty discussions.
A company for which I worked used to document its code
"automatically", but the manuals were essentially useless.
--
Kim Nguyen kim@watsup.waterloo.edu
Systems Design Engineering -- University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canadabob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) (06/01/89)
In article <EHO.89May27213128@bogey.Princeton.EDU> eho@bogey.Princeton.EDU (Eric Y.W. Ho) writes:
Also, is anyone extending texinfo where it can integrate code as
well... you're documenting your ideas & writing code at the same
time and when you've finished, you just run the whole thing through
some converter/filter and it'll churn out pure code on the one hand
and typesetted documentation for you designs on the other hand.
This sounds like what Knuth did with TeX: It was written in Web, a
dialect of Pascal. Depending upon whether you ran the source through
Tangle or Weave, you got Pascal or TeX source out the back, suitable
to be fed to the appropriate compiler.eho@cognito.Princeton.EDU (Eric Ho) (06/01/89)
>> In article <KIM.89May29194237@watsup.waterloo.edu> kim@watsup.waterloo.edu >> (Kim Nguyen) writes: >> >> In article <EHO.89May27213128@bogey.Princeton.EDU> eho@bogey.Princeton.EDU >> (Eric Y.W. Ho) writes: >> >> Also, is anyone extending texinfo where it can integrate code as >> well -- >> [...] now you're >> documenting your ideas & writing code at the same time and when >> you've finished, you just run the whole thing through some >> converter/filter and it'll churn out pure code (be they in Lisp, C >> or whatever) on the one hand and typesetted documentation for you >> designs on the other hand. >> >> Eric Ho >> Princeton Cognitive Science Lab., Princeton University >> email = eho@phoenix.princeton.edu voice = 609-987-2819 >> >> Generating "documentation" from the comments in your code is a >> somewhat brain-damaged way of describing your programs usefully. Good >> documentation consists of high-level descriptions, followed by >> increasingly detailed nitty-gritty discussions. >> >> A company for which I worked used to document its code >> "automatically", but the manuals were essentially useless. >> -- >> Kim Nguyen kim@watsup.waterloo.edu >> Systems Design Engineering -- University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Actually, what I've in mind was more like Don Knuth's WEB system where one can write code in a more or less hypertext fashion and one can easily sprinkle ideas/comments with the code so as to make the code much more easy to read. As for the typesetted documentation part, documentation means different thing to different people, depending on who is reading it. Obviously the kind of documentations that are sprinkled along with the code is really for people who need to understand your code quick & not really for people using your system. (of course, if one has time (ha ha) one can always write higher-level documentations or a paper so that casual users can have a better understanding of your system). Actaully, if you've implemented a somewhat complicated system and you've left it for a year or so and then you want to extend it or whatever, it usually will take you a while for you to remember what you've done at the nitty-gritty level and I hope that such as system will simply make such a process shorter and easier. It'll be nice too if it can be extended into multiple languages -- e.g. suppose you're building a system whose parts are written in different languages (e.g. Lisp & C++). -- regards. -eric- -- regards. -eric-