There's no reason that this needs to be the case; see Tomas Petricek's tools for producing tooltips for F# code on the web [1][2]
[1] http://tomasp.net/blog/fswebsnippets-intro.aspx [2] http://tomasp.net/blog/fsharp-literate-programming.aspx
Seems like the only thing left to do is getting patches into cat and diff. Seriously, adding support for inline signatures would solve the problem in a general way. Why not do this?
val map : f:('a -> 'b) -> list:'a list -> 'b list
let map f list = (*...*)
Reading F# (and Ocaml) without an editor sucks:
- Nobody bothers to include type or visibility annotations in function prototypes. Signature files are not local and thus are not included in diffs etc. If you think that doesn't matter, go to https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp/blob/master/src/fsharp/FSha... and tell me the type of generateWhileSome.
- The order of compilation matters, and is defined in the Build script:
> Essentially, I either start from the first line of the first file, and read forward, or the last line of the last file, working my way back."
That only works in the IDE. On github, the workflow goes like this: Open the build file, look for the first file. Find that file in the directory structure. Read that file and go back to the build script, rinse, repeat ad nausea.