Outshine, Haskell, and Haddock comments

[meditans]

Hi, I'm starting to use outshine when writing haskell, and there is this minor annoyance: the classic format for exportable documentation (like docstrings) in haskell is a comment line followed by a vertical pipe, like in:

-- | This is a comment to export

So, when I switch to the org view, that vertical pipe is interpreted as the beginning of a table. Is there a way to avoid this behaviour?

[meditans]

Thinking about it, maybe a possibility would be to view it in a special #+BEGIN_SRC: ... #+END_SRC block.

[tj64]

Hi, this is actually a kind of syntax mismatch between Org-mode and Haskell, and rather an issue for outorg, because outorg would have to deal with this special case while converting back and forth between Haskell and Org-mode.

I never used Haskell, but if I understand correctly these lines (multilines?) should be treated like code rather than like comments, i.e. wrapped into a Haskell src_block after conversion to org-mode (instead of converted to uncommented text)?

One way to achieve this might be to tweak the comment line regexp for haskell-mode in outorg a bit. Since I never used Haskell and don't know nothing about its comment syntax, its the generic approach that makes outshine/outorg work with haskell-mode, and there has to be introduced a special case.

Another (maybe easier) approach would be to preprocess these lines before conversion to org-mode when outorg is called, so they are not recognized as comments any more - maybe simply introduce a blank at BOL?

[meditans]

Your approach makes sense, I'll think about it and ask some opinions on what would be the better way to deal with this. In the meantime, should I open an issue on the outorg repo and close this one?

[tj64]

If you know Elisp and can deal with this yourself (patches welcome) would be perfect, but maybe I can have a look this weekend. Just leave the issue open here, doesn't matter.

But did I understand correctly, these lines should be treated like lines of code in the conversion? And are these always single lines or is there multi-line comment syntax too?

[tj64]

Can you please try if the issue is gone when you put 1 space before each Haddock comment before calling outorg? Then the fix would be simple pre/post-processing similar to what is done for message-mode.