Andrei's Google Talk

[Don]

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Aug 2010 11:48:00 -0400, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 2010-08-06 17:41, Alexander Malakhov wrote:
>>> Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy at yahoo.com> писал(а) в своём письме Fri,
>>> 06 Aug 2010 18:28:41 +0700:
>>>
>>>> 2. It seems like the documentation is HTML written as ddoc. I see $(P)
>>>> tags, $(LI) tags, etc. Can't we just write it as HTML?
>>>
>>> I have had exactly same thought when I've first seen DDoc a week ago
>>>
>>>
>>>> I think many would feel much more comfortable that way.
>>>
>>> I have virtually zero exp with HTML/XML, but DDocs syntax seems to be
>>> pretty
>>> straightforward
>>>
>>>> It's also more supported by editors. I forgot a closing parentheses on
>>>> one tag, and it screwed up the entire page. I had to find it by hand,
>>>> whereas an HTML editor could red-flag a tag without a closing tag, or
>>>> you could run it through an XML verifier (if it's xhtml).
>>>
>>> Good points. And XML is not going to disappear anytime soon, so there 
>>> will
>>> always be a lot of people familiar with it, as wall as tool for it.
>>> So I think it would be reasonable to have <tag/> syntax and HTML tags
>>> like <B>, <I> etc.
>>>
>>> Also, for example, what if I want to put extra ')' paren into $(D text)?
>>> I think there is (simple) solution, but that is one more thing to learn.
>>> In the end it's just markup language and I don't see much use in 
>>> learning
>>> more then one of them.
> 
>>>
>>> One reason of it I can think of: parsing speed and ambiguities (same as
>>> with <templates>)
>>>
>>> Anyway, when D will take over the world, they will have to change HTML
>>> syntax to fit what everyone already knows )
>>
>> One reason is why HTML is not used directly is that you could output 
>> the documentation in other formats than HTML, like PDF. A second 
>> reason to use macros (i.e. $(B arg)) instead of HTML is that this 
>> allows you to have the macro expand into something like this <span 
>> class="bold">arg</span> instead of <b>arg<b>. Of course one could 
>> define a language in XML to use instead of the macros.
> 
> Does ddoc output in pdf?  And besides, most of the tags *are* html tags, 
> they're even the same tag name.  I can't imagine there's no htmltopdf 
> program that would do exactly that.

The reason they're the same is that the docs were originally written in 
html. The original conversion to ddoc was done via search and replace.
One of the HUGE benefits of ddoc is that it does highlighting of the D 
code. That instantly saved Walter a lot of time.
Seriously, converting it to ddoc did improve productivity.