[Aldor-l] Ann: ALLPROSE / Suggestions

[Martin Rubey]

Ralf Hemmecke <ralf at hemmecke.de> writes:

> 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"?

Several things:

* it is more than one page. Two pages would be acceptable, I think.

* it doesn't contain the markup.

So what I'm thinking of is a single page which describes all the markup in
short phrases and *maybe* a paragraph summarizing Section 6.

Furthermore, it should be separate from the big document.

In a way it's as follows:

you provided means to organize documentation for different groups, namely users
and developers. But somehow, it seems not possible yet to extract the
information for users easily... In fact, this is another suggestion: There
should be a way to produce user-only documentation. (i.e., skipping almost
everything but the +++ comments)

> > * 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 think he will. Just ask. If you manage to make this work, you will have won
MathAction, provided that

> >   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.

> 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.

Yes, but with adsnippet only the code gets typeset, not the result!

> 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 suggest that you run Aldor/Axiom for the above purpose only if it's there,
and otherwise insert the message "Aldor/Axiom not found" into the verbatim
environment.

The benefit outweighs the problems by a lot. Think about it: all MathAction,
HyperDoc, AldorDoc united!

To integrate browse is another problem, but it is solveable, too!

Martin