Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Pamphlets and LaTex

[C Y]

I'll confess I'm a bit confused, but that may be my fault.  Questions:

1)  How does going from noweb to LaTeX syntax change anything, besides
what needs to be typed to ID a chunk?  I don't know about noweb, but
the whole point of wrapping the cl-web state machine in macros was to
be able to handle arbitrary delimiters.  If everything works as
expected, the options should be:

a.  (tangle <pamphlet>) -> source code
b.  latex pamphlet -> DVI document according to the abilities defined
in axiom.sty
c.  (weave <pamphlet>) -> TeX document with additional markup provided
by the weave logic in the WEB program.

This is the same regardless of what strings denote chunks - in theory
with enough work you could probably teach LaTeX to typeset straight
from the noweb syntax.  It just happens to be easier to have it in a
more LaTeX like form - that makes writing the style file for option b
much simpler.

It is highly unlikely that a pure LaTeX solution can supply all of the
features a weave step can provide.  Some of the more advanced ones
require full awareness of the source code.  cl-web doesn't have any of
this yet - in theory pure LaTeX processing could do everything the
current weave command can do in cl-web - but that doesn't mean it won't
in the future.

2.  Y'all ARE aware that cl-web already has a very basic weave
functionality, correct?  The cl-web pdf file was built from a TeX file
generated by cl-web itself, without noweb.  It's nothing spectacular
but I am using it to work on asdf-literate.  Extending it shouldn't be
too difficult, except for the whole source-code-reference bit (which to
do correctly will require cooperation from the Lisp compiler.)

3.  Is the intent still to move to the cl-web code once we get to ANSI,
or is gclweb the direction of the future?  If the latter I need to take
a closer look at that codebase.

4.  Do I understand correctly that a design goal here is to add
commands to the pamphlet files that will not be tangled but instead
executed in an Axiom environment?  There are two ways to interpret
that:

   a.  Provide a special LaTeX style that is aware of SPAD/interpreter
language syntax and typesets, but don't execute the code unless the
file is specifically processed with that intent (tangle, weave, and
run-spad?)

   b.  Process the commands during the LaTeX process and incorporate
the results of Axiom's evaluation automatically into the document. 
This is a bit more like the EMaxima functionality.  This is useful in
some situations but I am not sure we need to be worrying about it at
this stage.

Can someone provide me with some usage scenarios here?  What are the
goals?

5.  I'm a bit dubious about the possibility of treating documentation
as chunks - I tend to view documentation of .spad.pamphlet files as
indivisible conceptually (not just technically.)  To me the best bet is
to go with what is already done in the academic world - combine papers
into volumes in the "conference proceeding" fashion.  There will be
many different writing styles at work in the Axiom system, and it's
almost certain they won't "flow" in such a fashion as to lend
themselves to having pieces mixed and matched.

Am I missing something here?  Help!

CY


       
____________________________________________________________________________________
Got a little couch potato? 
Check out fun summer activities for kids.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=oni_on_mail&p=summer+activities+for+kids&cs=bz