[Orgmode] [babel] Painless integration of source blocks with language

[Seth Burleigh]

Preface: I hope attachments show up, i dont know if they are allowed ....

Im currently interested in using babel for a medium size clojure project. I think the below propositions would greatly benefit babel in accomplishing literate programming.

First part of the proposal to make this painless:

In a literate document, you might very well have small chunks of code for one ns scattered around and then finally combined using noweb into one file and tangle the output. Currently, keys like

compile-file (C-c C-k), goto function definition (M-.), do not work at all in the source blocks. This is unfortunate, and makes life very painful. So, first we need to get these keys to work.  

Heres how it can possibly be done.

Lets say we want to compile the code in block A. Block B uses noweb syntax to import block A, and then tangles to file src/B.clj. So we need to search for  the presence of <<A>> in a tangled code chunk , tangle the chunk to a file, go to the file buffer and position the cursor at the correct relative position, and then invoke the appropriate function (in this case, slime-compile-and-load-file). 

Ive attached two files which do this, the first one is an example org file in which you can use the compile keystrokes on (after opening a slime server for clojure). However, it doesnt position the cursor in the tangled file correctly, but this is not needed for compile/load file. Its not a very good implementation, but it works for this case. Also, it doesn't work when the indirect buffer created by C-c '  is open. The advantage of this method is that it can easily be generalized to any language, since the compiler gets what it expects - a file of code to operate on.  

Second part of proposal:

Literate documents are good for documentation, but if you're the author, you dont need the documentation and it will certainly get in the way of you writing code to keep having to type C-c ' to open various chunks of code. Ideally, we would like to have our file of code (that is, the tangled file output for one ns in clojure) as the top buffer, and our documentation at the bottom. Changes to the code will automatically reflect itself in the documentation (after a save). In order to accomplish this, there has to be a method to map from tangled file line number, to the correct chunk name and line number in the .org file. This might be accomplished by tangling code like this:

;;#chunk-name

..code

;;#

I think this would be much more natural than editing each chunk separately. Of course, the ;;# might become an annoyance, but im sure there might  be a better way.

With this mapping , we can develop the code until we get it right. Then we can hit a keystroke and have our documentation jump to the correct line number in the .org file, and then do all the documentation for that. 

With the line mapping ability also comes the ability to map errors in the line number to numbers in the org file. Although, this probably wouldn't be necessary, since we would be looking at the combined chunk file. 

Any thoughts/ideas how to implement this?

test.org
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seth-obj-clj.el
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