[Haskell-cafe] RE: Richer (than ascii) notation for haskell source?

Patrick Surry Patrick.Surry at portraitsoftware.com
Wed May 14 22:28:51 EDT 2008


Sorry, missed a mail digest: LyX and lhs2tex sound more like what I
mean.

Patrick

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Surry 
Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 10:24 PM
To: 'haskell-cafe at haskell.org'
Subject: Re: Richer (than ascii) notation for haskell source?

Lots of folk have suggested writing code with Unicode symbols, but that
doesn't really get me where I'm thinking of.  Back in the day, I spent
many happy hours writing math(s) in amstex style, peppered with latex
backslash references/macros for greek symbols, set operators as well as
character attributes like underline, bold, goth, italic and so on.  With
the magic of (la)tex and dvips you get a rich intuitive representation
of your equations - where you can 'see' types by character attributes
(bold vectors, gothic sets or whatever) and have easily readable
operators, functions, etc.  Similarly to display alternative pattern
cases as a display equation?  

So maybe what I really want is to essentially write my source in (la)tex
and be able to both compile and render to dvi at the same time?  I
suppose word's crazy equation editor or mathml is another option but it
makes the source itself either less portable or less readable?

I think Knuth talks about literate programming as this ability to
intermingle 'beautified' human-readable representation along with code,
and it seems like Haskell is close to delivering that.  (Tho I think
"literate Haskell" is not the same thing.)

Perhaps a pipe dream tho.

Patrick

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