Request for comments on proposal for literate programming using markdown

[Philip Holzenspies]

On 22 Aug 2012, at 16:29, Brandon Allbery wrote:

> Even so.  A concrete version of what I'm getting at is that ghc is self-bootstrapping, so older versions need to be able to build newer ones; GHC code using a new markdown literate preprocessor --- or, worse, one integrated with lexing or parsing --- will not be buildable with GHC versions predating its addition.  So even given the addition of such, ghc wont itself be able to use it for at least several releases, to give OS distributions etc. time to upgrade their packages to versions that can build the result.  (Asking them to re-bootstrap is usually asking too much; they'll likely just stop updating or possibly drop ghc entirely.)

Of course, but this is where the (very old) -pgmL command line switch would have come in. Simply releasing the unlitter as a stand-alone tool also and invoking it from an old GHC by using -pgmL, which could be automated in the build system; including the check for the GHC version to see whether any external tooling was required at all.

Anyway, the point is a bit moot. It seems obvious that the proposal had very little support and has been withdrawn.

Ph.