HATEX pragma

Before start growing the HaTeX project with more features and modules, I decided to add a new feature: the HATEX pragma.

What problem this solves?

This pragma will save of modifying HaTeX-meta each time a new module is added or deleted from HaTeX. Until today, HaTeX-meta had a fix list of modules that it will process to generate the analogous .Monad modules, and each time a module is added or deleted from HaTeX, you needed to add (or delete) its module name in the HaTeX-meta code. I saw this too short-sighted, so I made a change.

How it is solved?

The solution was to order to HaTeX-meta to search HaTeX modules which have the MakeMonadic option in a HATEX pragma. This pragma looks like this:

{-# OPTIONS_HATEX MakeMonadic #-}

HaTeX-meta follows the next steps:

1. Parse the HaTeX.cabal package description.
2. Look for the exposed modules.
3. Parse all modules and filter those with the MakeMonadic option enabled.
4. Process them to create the .Monad modules, skipping the MakeMonadic option in the output (so in the next run of HaTeX-meta it will not process a .Monad module).

See the code of HaTeX-meta here.

Conclusion

I hope this will make easier future changes in HaTeX and avoid updates of HaTeX-meta with changes not directly related with it. Also, I think this will be handy to developers interested in add a new module to HaTeX to, for example, implement some new LaTeX package.

 

Thanks for read,

Daniel Díaz.