pk@tut.fi (Kellom{ki Pertti) (02/21/90)
>>>>> On 20 Feb 90 23:50:34 GMT, rokicki@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki) said:
Tomas> Make two copies of the same program, one printed with tgrind/WEB/
Tomas> whatever, and one just printed out with a monospaced font. Now try
Tomas> and read each. Which do you really find easier to read?
Tomas> The rapid font changes (bold keywords, italic identifiers, etc.)
Tomas> in the output of such programs as tgrind manage to slow my
Tomas> comprehension of the code, by just making it a lot more difficult
Tomas> to read. (WEB is slightly better than tgrind, in that the fonts used
Tomas> are much closer in weight to one another.)
Tomas> Personally, I use a monospaced font (cmtt10, or a bold courier) for
Tomas> the code sections of my projects, and standard TeX for the comment
Tomas> sections.
I tend to agree. I've used SchemeTeX, which basicly just uses
typewriter font for code sections and formats comments as TeX text,
and I've been really happy about the scheme code I write showing up
just like I typed it in. I'm not quite sure I would like to have
reserved words in boldface etc. I also like to indent my programs
myself (or let Emacs do it) instead of relying some automatic pretty
printing. (Especially line breaks are not always so easy)
Another thing is that with languages like scheme where your procedures
tend to be small and the order in which your definitions appear in the
source does not matter that much, the module system of WEB does not
make much sense. A lot of the other stuff that WEB-like systems do,
like converting 'i:=j^2' to '$i \leftarrow j^2$', (the assignment
operators shows up as an arrow in the output and exponentiation shows
up as superscript) are not of much use with scheme's prefix notation.
What I like about WEB-like systems is the ability to create indices,
cross references etc. I used GNU project's texinfo format instead of
LaTeX like the original SchemeTeX does, and the ability to make an
on-line document out of my code and browse it using GNU Emacs's info
system proved to be very valuable.
--
Pertti Kellom\"aki (TeX format) # These opinions are mine,
Tampere Univ. of TeXnology # ALL MINE !
Software Systems Lab # (but go ahead and use them, if you like)