character syntax

Jorge Adriano jadrian@mat.uc.pt
Fri, 8 Feb 2002 23:10:13 +0000


On Friday 08 February 2002 14:35, Ketil Z. Malde wrote:
> Jorge Adriano <jadrian@mat.uc.pt> writes:
> > Haskell looks nice... Isabell looks beautiful :-)
>
> I'm not familiar with Isabell, but aren't we comparing apples and
> oranges here?  E.g. you can prettify .lhs pretty nicely with one of
> the LaTeX packages available.

Well yes :-)
You said "Personally, I think the Haskell syntax is beautiful", and in my 
answer I talked about the way it looked on Xemacs, not the syntax. 
But not sure if we are talking about the same thing here, how do you prettify 
the .lhs files? Are you talking about the dvi you get in the end or the way 
it looks while editing the code? 

> > And no, I don't have the time to do something
> > better myself now, so I'll just stick to it :-)
>
> If somebody would come up with a mode that used lambdas and arrows to
> render things nicely in my editor, I wouldn't mind.  But I don't think
> the benefit for me would be great enough to justify the effort (I'm
> not much of a lisp hacker).

I wouldn't mind either. Everything looks really nice, making your code really 
easy to read, it's not just the greek leters, the 'forall's, the arrows '=>', 
the 'and's and the 'or's.
But the Isabell/Isar/Proof General (which I haven't used in a long time) mode 
had more to it than just that. The menus were pretty good, buttons (with 
icons) for some commands... it turns Xemacs into a very nice GUI for isabelle.

J.A.