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Latex mathematical expressions in F# comments interpreted by intellisense ?
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Hello,

I code some scientific applications (in Linux), and I often add some comments with latex mathematical expressions that then get interpreted when I print out the code, which is very useful.

Being a first time user of VS, because of F# which seems to thrive there, I discovered that if my mouse pointer stands over a function name, intellisense prints out the comments of that function that are written with three slashes ///, which is very nice and extremely useful.

Now, could it be possible for intellisense to interpret the comments and if there is some math expression, interpret it and display it in a nice mathematical form ?

Hopeful and candid, I tried :

/// This function computes $x^2$

but intellisense just printed that out verbatim.

Of course, it would be even better if VS was "latex aware"... everywhere, and not only in intellisense.

Yann

.

Hey Yann,

I find your suggestion interesting and as I have recently been implementing some algorithms that have a quite theoretical background (read: greek symbols everywhere ;)) I was thinking along the same lines.

I think for teaching purposes and the readability of code in general it would be nice come up with a way of using formatting on source code. I don't know if anyone has done this before in a productive (or even semi-productive ;)) system before and it's certainly not trivial (form a practal point of view) to get this right in an IDE.

Apart from the complexities that come with displaying and editing formated content refactoring support would become even more necessary imo.

AUCTeX allows inline editing and previewing of latex content in Emacs and it may be possible to hack some of this support into an F#/latex mode :)

Daniel

By on 9/9/2008 1:11 AM ()

F# code supports unicode, so you could just put the symbols directly (although you have to remember the key strokes for the symbols and I guess this isn't quite as flexible as latex).

By on 9/9/2008 2:13 AM ()

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