Hello, sorry for a bit late answer, but I was very busy Monday/Tuesday. To make this more readable I will try to summerize here as one-piece text for easier reading. As you mention yourself from,Wikipedia, literate programming is about moving away from programming for computers to programming for humans. Using comments to comment-away text ment for humans or to mark lines between comments and code is indeed writing for the computer, not the human. Humans tend to be distracted by unnecessary clutter, and managing stuff just for the sake of machine does take a little more effort then not doing it. Being programming-language agnostic though is probably not possible without having some kind of special tool, or special syntax due to some languages being probably very hard to distinguish from ordinary text. For example I believe that C/C++ or even Bash or Makefiles are very hard if not impossible to process that way without some very complicated parser. I can also imagine case where Elisp is impossible to distinguish from text, (for example this line is valid text but would fail in parser), or whatever we would put into a parenthesis on a separate line that does not belong to code. Anyway, due to elisp looks, we have those "natural markers", ( and ) which we can use as delimiters between code and text. For the question of being concerned about omitting ';' to change the parser. Well yes :-). Small syntactic sugar change but it reduces that visual clutter. It is one step in that direction of writing code for humans and not for the computer. See it as experiment. I thought it would be a cool thing to have. It is just an idea. The change is not in an intrusive way. All your elisp is still very same. It just adds an extra feature pretty much for free. If it would be an intrusive change that requires your old elisp to change, than I wouldn't suggest it. By the way, one could also add a variable to turn off that feature. As for the tools, since old elisp code does not change, all your tools would still continue to work on all your ordinary elisp, and you could still use ';' just as you do now. What would change is that you would be able to write some elisp as you can't now, and only on that code the tools would probably get confused. I have no idea how hard would it be to change font-locking and indentation checkers, maybe hard, maybe not at all. I can't answer that since I am not acquianted with how those tools are implemented (lots of regex as I have heard). But in worst case, you can always fall back on writing ordinary elisp. As a note, one will still have to use ';' in directives, like ;;;###autoload or ;;; -*- lexical-binding: t; -*- . Otherwise it would need lots more work to get it to work, which I am not sure is worth. Från: Adam Porter Skickat: den 17 december 2019 12:07 Till: emacs-devel@gnu.org Ämne: Re: Sv: Sv: Christmas wish: Literate Elisp arthur miller writes: > It is true, that keeping directives in comments does not break the > existing parser, but then it is not so much of literate programming, > is it? Literate programming is not a matter of syntax. For example, this summary in the Wikipedia article seems to describe it well: Literate programming is a programming paradigm introduced by Donald Knuth in which a computer program is given an explanation of its logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed with snippets of macros and traditional source code, from which compilable source code can be generated. The literate programming paradigm, as conceived by Knuth, represents a move away from writing computer programs in the manner and order imposed by the computer, and instead enables programmers to develop programs in the order demanded by the logic and flow of their thoughts. Literate programs are written as an uninterrupted exposition of logic in an ordinary human language, much like the text of an essay, in which macros are included to hide abstractions and traditional source code. Literate programming (LP) tools are used to obtain two representations from a literate source file: one suitable for further compilation or execution by a computer, the "tangled" code, and another for viewing as formatted documentation, which is said to be "woven" from the literate source. While the first generation of literate programming tools were computer language-specific, the later ones are language-agnostic and exist above the programming languages. None of that requires un-prefixed comment syntax. Consider examples of actual, full-scale literate programming projects, which are written in a variety of languages and source code formats. > If we would just use directives in comments then we already have org + > babel. But I think 4 extra lines of C code to enable this feature in > eval-loop was a trivial price to pay :-). Changing the canonical parser of a widely used language would have effects reaching far beyond the parser's native software. Consider all other software which parses Elisp, e.g. syntax highlighting tools outside of Emacs, which would not correctly highlight these un-prefixed comments you propose. As well, consider other implementations, like Guile's, which would also have to be adjusted. Then consider all the code linting tools which would likely need fixing. It's not merely a matter of 4 lines of code in an Emacs source file. As has been mentioned, benefits such as outlining are easily achieved with existing tools, some of which are even built-in to Emacs (e.g. outline-minor-mode for simple outlining in Elisp files, and org-mode for prose-first, noweb-style source files). Are you really so concerned about omitting a semicolon at the beginning of top-level comment lines that you want to change the Elisp parser?