[LMH]Outstanding work on SSDN2

[John Morrison]

Hi;

On Friday 26 April 2002 05:17 am, James A. Crippen wrote:
> John Morrison <jm@mak.com> writes:
> > For what it's worth, I am frankly a little stunned at how great a job
> > you guys have done on OCRing, typing, editing, formatting, etc. SSDN2.
> > This is such a dramatic improvement over the original page scans.  So
> > far, I am finding it to be incredibly useful.  Wow.
>
> It'll only get better.  I'm looking at in the future going over the
> thing with hyperref to add hyperlinks that can exist in both DVI and
> PDF versions.

(He asked, most definitely pushing his luck...) Now that you guys have
got this down to a science, does this mean I should finally scan in my
LISP CHINE NUAL for similar treatment?  I promised Francois Rideau at
tunes.org that I would someday do this, but it has never risen to the
front of my 9-PalmPilot-page "todo" list.

> At some point I'd like to get LaTeX->HTML and LaTeX->text conversion
> working as well.  The former so it can be put on the web page, the
> latter for grepping, text terminal viewing, etc.
>
> On other documentation fronts, I'd like to see some literate
> programming be put into the current sources, so that documentation can
> be automatically snarfed from them to generate details that are

Some of the folk at work swear by Doxygen (sp?).  Unfortunately, I
have never played with is.  Let me know what to do.

> otherwise lost in the sea of semicolons.  This would be particularly
> nice when reviewing code, as one could just print out the pretty
> TeXified version and sit at the coffee shop with it, the SSDN2, and a
> hot cup of coffee.  And it'd be useful for newbies, as they could
> actually have some explanation of what they are looking at.
>
> Programming is an art.  Computing may be a science, but programming is
> an art.  And artists should have beautiful things.  Ergo, source code
> should be beautiful.  And readable too, despite what C and Perl people
> seem to think.  (INTERCAL people are excused since they are
> deliberately trying to abuse readers, much like Japanese noise
> musicians are deliberately trying to abuse their listeners.

If code were art, mine would either be Chiaroscuro (half obscured in
darkness) or vaguely Picasso-esque (in the sense that both eyes were
on the same side of the face -- lacking perspective?).  I expect many
much more amusing analogies could be made here if I had the benefit of
a Classical Education.

-jm


-- 
==== John Morrison
==== MAK Technologies Inc.
==== 185 Alewife Brook Parkway, Cambridge, MA 02138
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