Re: [Axiom-developer] Pamphlet files and Axiom

[Andrey G. Grozin]

Hello *,

Each layer of syntax brings in extra complications. For example, with the 
standard noweb syntax one cannot use << and >> unescaped. When there are 
many layers and many things to be escaped by different characters, things 
become unreadable. For example, if I want to find all lines with \\ in my 
LaTeX file, I have to say

grep \\\\\\\\ foo.tex

because of regex escapes and shell escapes (yes, I know how to write it a 
little shorter, but I just wanted to show an example with multi-layes 
escapes due to the regex syntax and the shell syntax). Similar things 
happen in C strings with regexes, etc. The fewer layers, escapes and 
syntaxes, the better.

noweb is (as far as I know) not flexible enough to do axiom-specific 
things (like introspection). Such things should be done by axiom 
components, like compiler. And it is equally easy to teach it to 
understand \begin{chunk}{foo} ... \end{chunk} as the noweb syntax. One 
layer less, no need to escape << and >>.

Andrey