Will the availability of browsers affect source code?

Well there has been discussion for donkeys-years about alternative source
forms to raw ASCII. Inmos Occam went out with a folded source format and
editor linked to the compiler (so that error messages could be reported
without a line-number reference). Many of the more interactive systems
have tried to sell the idea of having a rich source format that allows use
of different fonts etc. And of course Knuth tried to sell the world on
Web - a source form that could either map to Pascal to be compiled or to
TeX for printout.


The big advantage of HTML is that it is the first 'standard' that really
is reaching all platforms. But its big disadvantage is that so far it is
only really available for browsers. Most of the time when viewing source,
I'm wanting to edit it not admire it. So we need an HTML and source
language aware editor and a compiler that can accept HTML marked source (a
bit awkward from the lexical side with most languages). We will then need
to get away from file-based compilation and mark the modular boundaries
explicitly in the source (why does C still resist this?). HTML as it
stands is not really sufficient for source as it provides very little
control over columnar alignment - if we finally stop using monospaced
fonts for source we will need some automated alignment (TeX-like?) to get
our nice indentation and text arrangement back.


But maybe it won't be too long before I can sit down to a table of contents
with my module (or class or ...) hierarchy and appendices for a symbol index,
compiler logs and previous versions.


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Lloyd Email: Dave@occl-cam.demon.co.uk
Oxford and Cambridge Compilers Ltd Phone: (44) 223 572074
55 Brampton Rd, Cambridge CB1 3HJ, UK
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