Re: New manual plan

[Erik <erik@msc.tamu.edu>]

On Thu, 12 Nov 1998, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> > If you can suggest a good solution to the duplication problem, I might
> > change my mind.
> 
> Find a clever way to process the same files twice and output either a
> C manual or a Scheme manual. I don't know that much about texinfo, but
> TeX itself is turing complete. If hacking macros to do this is
> impossible or undesirable, some minimally intelligent preprocessing
> layer should be able to handle it. I can even think of ways to do it
> with cpp, the world's lamest preprocessor. 

Once a person has gotten used to the language they mainly want a reference
to look up how to use specific functions (or am I the only person who
occasionally looks up printf() to find the finer points of formatting
floats?)  I'd hate to have to create two different .dvi or .ps files to
search through when I wanted to cross reference scheme versus C, and I'm
not sure what it has to gain from putting gh_scm2int a long way from
gh_int2scm.   I'd prefer to have them all together, with similar functions
side by side.  On the other hand, you pretty much have to have separate
"this is how you start guile" sections, one going over the wonderful
command line options, and another detailing the joys of handing over
main() to gh_enter() (and perhaps mentioning how it will segfault if you
don't do it in the right place ;-)



Erik