raph-amiard / intro-to-ada Goto Github PK

I think we should refrain from doing language comparisons. They should be limited to cases where the Ada syntax might be confusing and mentioning a different language might prevent the reader from jumping into wrong conclusions. In other words, the language comparison would actually be used for clarification in these cases. Other kind of comparisons (especially against C/C++) could be left for separate tutorials.

We discussed putting stuff like language comparisons, and some other stuff, in custom block quotes that would distinguish them from the flow of text.

I investigated a little bit what is doable in this regard with rst:

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#highlights

Seems to be three custom block quote directives already: Epigraph, Highlights, and Pull quote. None of those exactly have the intent that we want.

There is a "container" directive that will insert a div with a class in the generated HTML. The problem I have with using that is that, when reading the document on GitHub/other non specialized RST reader, it won't even appear as a quote.

We could introduce a custom block quote directive, by introducing a new RST directive, as described here: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/howto/rst-directives.html. But that would have the same drawback as above: Would not render correctly on GH, might even be worse.

So I guess that leaves us with the following solutions:

1. Re-use the four existing block quotes class for our purposes, assigning them custom meaning in our document. Probably will make reading the raw RST weird for people who don't know, but that's a small price.
2. Use the container, and screw reading the document on GH :)
3. Custom directives, same as above. Will also make rendering the document a bit harder since we need to ship the extensions along with the .rst.

Gustavo, Nico, Rob, what do you think ?

Having manual line wrap (due to e.g. 80-character limitation) might be annoying in some cases. For example, when words are added to a single phrase, the whole paragraph might need to be "realigned". It is especially difficult to review the differences, since comparison tools might indicate that the whole paragraph changed.

My suggestion is that we try using one line per paragraph and see if that works better. Of course, this suggestion only applies to raw text: for source-code, using the 80-char limit is perfectly fine.