From: Conrad Schneiker/Austin/Contr/IBM <schneik@...>
Date: 2000-10-14T02:22:19+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:5517] Re: 2 ideas from Haskell

Mark Slagell wrote:

# Dave Thomas wrote:
# > 
# > Mark Slagell <ms@iastate.edu> writes:
# > 
# > > 1. a "literate mode" that assumes all lines in a script are comments
# > > unless the first column is a special character (Haskell uses '>').
.... 
# > So I'm not sure that adding this kind of facility helps much. Could
# > someone convince me?
....
# The innate readability of
# ruby, for what it's worth, isn't entirely what I'm concerned with here. 
# 
# There are situations where the code is not the main point of the
# document you're writing, even if it's an important part.  Some kinds of
# conceivable documentation would benefit from this (read a web page
# containing some instructional text, then test the code it contains by
# dumping the html page directly into the interpreter instead of
# downloading a separate script or copy/pasting, why not?).  For another
# example, to be able to use ruby in a college programming course, it
# would be ideal to be able to intersperse runnable code with answers to
# homework exercises.  And I do think ruby is going to be the _ideal_
# instructional language for beginners if the academic world notices it.

And for another tangent, there is this:

    http://www.perl.com/pub/tchrist/litprog.html

    POD is Not Literate Programming

    by Mark-Jason Dominus
    Mar. 20, 2000 

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)