[plt-scheme] Tables in Scribblings

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 7:08 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
>> But it doesn't give an example of just getting a solitary @.
>
> It doesn't feel right to me to jump right into the relevant
> subtelties, and the paragraph that you quoted is basically the
> introduction.  (But I will try to put some clarifying examples close
> to that paragraph.)

I totally agree. You're in between a rock and a hard place determining
the right detail.

> There's this example, which is pretty explicit:
>
>  @foo{The prefix: @"@".}     reads as  (foo "The prefix: @.")

Now that you show them, these should have helped me a lot. But as I
read through I saw @foo and said, "But I'm not writing a call or
something inside a call, ignore it." If I were an extreme reader, I
should have noticed. But I'm lazy documentation reader and didn't see
it. (In fact, I'm sure its been there the last 6 or 7 times I've tried
to remember this and I've missed it every time.) Clearly something is
wrong, but it's probably me. Forgive my honesty :)

>> [...]
>> Another example is that the manual libraries are documented as
>> Scheme calls. It is true that they are Scheme functions, but they
>> feel like markup. Just putting examples in the @ syntax would be an
>> amazing improvement. It is hard to tell where to use [] and where to
>> use {}
>
> That's a known problem.  It comes from the current implementation of
> the `scheme' macro, which organizes the code according to the source
> information of the syntax -- but that source information is roughly
> the same for `@foo[x]{y}' and for `(foo x "y")'.  There are certain
> syntax properties that mark scribble-read expressions, but
> reconstructing the input form from that is too difficult.

I anticipated there was a good reason. I can't wait till your two
giant brains figure it out. =)

Jay


-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://jay.teammccarthy.org

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93