Re: Issues with literate programming DSSSL Script

[Brandon Ibach <bibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoting Wroth, Mark <MARK.WROTH@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> BI>    As far as writing by hand, I guess it's just something to get used
> BI> to.  Any language has things like this that you need to learn.  I
> BI> wrote C for years, faithfully surrounding my strings with
> BI> double-quotes, only to have to learn to use single-quotes, instead,
> BI> when I started doing a lot of SQL.  And every now and then, I throw
> BI> myself a real curve ball when Postscript makes me use parens for
> BI> strings. :)
> 
> That's essentially why I was willing to declare victory when I was able to
> set up entities &lt;, &gt;, and &amp; that got the desired characters into
> the output; all literate programming systems have this basic problem
> (usually on the character "@", since that's what Knuth chose in the original
> WEB).
> 
   Actually, the best I've seen in this regard would be Javadoc, which
has the programmer embed the documentation in specially-formatted
comments, thus requiring no special tricks in writing the code, and
requiring no pre-parsing of the code before compilation.  Not the best
thing to hear from an SGML maven, though, eh?  :P

> By the way, I discovered a serious flaw in the implementation I thought was
> adequate (and which may possibly show up on the OpenJade site as a
> commenting draft).  It fails to deal correctly with nested scrap references,
> a fact which caused me some head scratching about how various modes work.
> The (now working) redesign involved breaking up the functions of header and
> continuation scraps into two different element types. While I think I could
> have come up with a way to make the original DTD work, this provides a much
> cleaner and enforceable syntax in the input file.  So I think it's an
> overall improvement.
> 
   Actually, when I built a simple demo of this, I was able to handle
nested scraprefs by processing the referenced scrap with the same code
that I used to process a regular scrap.  I'll send you the little
example I did, which isn't perfect, but may give you an idea or two. :)

-Brandon :)


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