[Aldor-l] Ann: ALLPROSE / Suggestions

[Ralf Hemmecke]

Hi Martin,

> * it would be very useful - if not necessary - if you provided a one page
>   summary on how to use ALLPROSE for the average A{ldor,xiom} programmer,
>   separate from the complete 225 pages documentation.

I thought there is enough overview material at the beginning of the 
ALLPROSE documentation, but seemingly one easily gets distracted by the 
vast amount of documentation of all the make files so that a short 
section "How to work with ALLPROSE" is certainly a good idea. However, I 
am not quite sure what you would like to see in such a section. What do 
you think is missing from Section 6 "How to Start a New Project"?

> * maybe you can connect yourself with Eitan Gurari to enable automatic
>   translation to html/mathml via tex4ht?

Thank you, I would really be happy if somebody could assist me with that 
translation.

> * I really want that your documentation format becomes a replacement for Axioms
>   Hypertex format.

Well, I would be happy if ALLPROSE goes this way.

 >   However, there is one bit missing: it is necessary that we
>   have an environment that contains Axiom/Aldor commands which are then sent to
>   the Axiom/Aldor interpreter and the result gets then set in verbatim. Would
>   this be a lot of work?

Well, the aldordoc.sty is basically an agreement between Christian 
Aistleitner and me in order to introduce some kind of standard for the 
+++ comments that are possible in Aldor. As you see, the +++ 
environments are translated into +++ comments and put into the .as 
files. So the Aldor compiler actually sees them and puts them into the 
corresponding .ao file. Unfortunately there is not yet a program which 
extracts these comments form the .ao file (or the .al library). This 
would be on my wishlist.

There were, in fact, several codesnippet environments planned. Christian 
came also up with "adprogram" which was meant to contain a complete 
Aldor program that could be fed to the compiler. Actually, there were 
even 3 similar environments for similar purposes. Only "adsnippet" survived.

I decided for simplicity (in the first ALLPROSE release). A second 
reason is that currently the Aldor compiler is NOT needed to produce the 
.dvi file. I could relax this if, for example, the computation of the 
dependencies would be easier with the compiler. Of course it would not 
be a big deal to introduce a new environment that would contain Aldor 
programs which would be fed to the compiler and show the results. 
However, I believe that needs a bit of discussion because in order to 
run something one must make sure that the appropriate libraries are 
installed.

Ralf