Martin's Miscs

[Matthew Lye]

  I've just downloaded Martin Wierich's misc functions, and I'd like to 
encourage him to further anotate them.  It strikes me that the sharing of 
libraries is *extremely* useful in Clean;  perhaps when the web world 
moves more towards XML we can agree on some sort of DTD for XML markup, 
to be included within /* */ pairs:  this could facilitate the online 
description of functions within a module, searching for functions in a 
central library, etcetera.  

  An even nicer idea, which insofar as I can see would be easy to 
implement, would be to have the Clean parser ignore HTML, XML, SGML, 
CSS[1..], or DSSSL mark-up.  These all depend on <...> braces.  (It would 
be good if the editor could optionally do this).  This would involve a 
quick-and-dirty pre-parser that simply strips the tags.  Needless to say, 
this would strike a blow on behalf of literate programing, would 
facilitate the description, presentantion, and sharing of Clean code via 
the web, and would set us all on a path towards the easy implementation 
of luxurious, word-processor type XML/SGML Clean editors, replete with 
display and parsing functions.  For instance, wouldn't it be nice to have 
a background syntax checker that told the editor to render functions in a 
nice shade of orange or yellow unless and until they were syntactically 
correct, or highlighted absolutely incorrect lines in red?  Wouldn't it 
be nice to have optional colour-coding to represent variable types?  
Wouldn't it be nice to display mathematical equations in a mathematical 
rather than a computer science form?  Although this is all sugar, it 
would be nice if Clean was designed to support these non-proprietary 
formats, and I suspect that even the most formal computer scientist 
occasionally has a sweet tooth.

  (Martin's email is 1wierich@informatik.uni-hamburg.de)

  Matt Lye.

(PS, Martin, my uncle is a dentist in Hamburg, so you need not fear such 
suggestions;  I'll write you an introduction).