[Haskell-cafe] Markdown extension for Haddock as a GSoC project

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 29/04/2013, at 10:04 PM, kudah wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:04:47 +1200 "Richard A. O'Keefe"
> <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> 
>> so that there is no possibility of catching errors early;
>> by definition in that processor there are no errors.
> 
> Haddock's markup isn't any better in that regard.

Did I praise Haddock?

> I spent two hours on
> my first day with haddock figuring out that I needed an empty comment
> line before a code block. It didn't issue any warnings or errors either.

Report that as a bug.

For what it's worth, I've resurrected an old design I did and have
been playing with it to see just how bad it really is to use something
like @i<word> than _word_.  (Can anyone remember the name of the old
formatting program that the * and _ convention comes from?  I've got a
manual for it buried in a box I can't reach, and I've been trying to
remember the name.  The manual was a UBC technical report some time in
the early 80s, which may mean it was written in BCPL.)
I took a thousand line documentation file and converted it to this
unambiguous markup with a single reserved character, and the size
increase was actually, well, actually, it got @i<smaller>.

I'm not going to describe the notation, because the point is that
"unambiguous" and "lightweight" are compatible properties.