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Comment by moosingin3space | Hacker News Reader

Rust should have a literate source format - with how much the community focuses on documentation, this would be an excellent addition.

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There'a crate for that ;) https://github.com/pnkfelix/tango

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/26097

With the literate style, code is prefixed and comments are raw. So, instead of:

    -- foo is a function
    foo :: String -> String

It's

    foo is a function
    > foo :: String -> String

You could probably hack something together with a build.rs and a preprocessor, but that would probably not be very nice long term.

Sorry, I am not understanding what you're implying here. I am well aware of the definition of literate programming. (And what you've said isn't actually enough to be considered literate programming under Knuth's definition: that's just tangle, still missing weave. Though notably, a lot of people argue that weave isn't needed with today's programming languages...)

I mentioned it because I didn't see it in my scanning of the issue you linked to.

Edit: I should have looked more closely, sorry.

Ah, no worries! I agree the issue is slightly down in the weeds, but don't worry, it's tracking the right thing :)

Literate programming is more than that. It is encouraged to order things such that they make sense to the reader, not to the compiler. You can give names to chunks of code and later glue them all together in a different order.

My tool of choice for this is Emacs org-mode with noweb support. The source file is "tangled" (i.e. individual chunks of code are glued back together in a specified order) to create the source for the compiler to process.

Haskell itself has only limited support for literate programming. Most importantly it lacks the ability to reorder chunks of code. (noweb or org-mode babel can be used with Haskell, of course.)

There's little need to reorder Haskell code because you can define things in any order.

The literate programming tangle process mainly exists to remove Pascal's order restrictions.

Reordering is still useful in Haskell. Just two examples for order dependent things in Haskell: top-level Template Haskell splicing; imports and GHC feature comments.

It can be nice to have a single document explaining the whole project, producing individual source files upon tangling. For this approach you need control over order and target files. "Literate Haskell" is hardly more than a reversal of the meaning of comments and code.

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