Publication of the French translation of Ali's "Programming in D" book

[Philippe Sigaud]

On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 10:29 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> On 12/8/13 1:22 PM, Raphaël Jakse wrote:
>>
>> To be fair, I used Whata! mainly because I am the author of this syntax
>> and I'm used to it.
>
>
> I'd say that's a perfectly reasonable answer.

Well, using Ddoc would be a good demonstration it's possible to write
entire document in it (or not!).

Using markdown would open up the text to people already used to it
(like many people using github, for example) and facilitate pull
requests. If people must learn a new syntax to contribute to a
document, it's less certain they will do it. At this stage, I'm not
sure where to find a Whata! tutorial.

Using plain text is also an option, I guess.

What format used Ali? HTML?

>> I can try to explain why I wrote Whata! instead of Markdown.
>
>
> Does Whata! have a good macro system? After much thinking I got to the
> conclusion a good macro system is essential for generating quality published
> material (which sadly is contradicted by the likes of Markdown which lack
> decent macro systems).

Indeed, although I'm not sure Markdown goal is to generate 'quality'
documents, but more 'easily readable and manipulable documents'.

LaTeX is acceptable for macros, but full of gotchas.
I still have to use Ddoc for more than 1-page long documents.

Or else, we need a document-writing library in D, which could emit
Ddoc, HTML, LaTeX and pure text :)