Leanpub: Publish Early, Publish Often

3. Semi-literate programming

Here we explain the simplest use of litpro: elevating comments to readable paragraphs.

The idea here is quite simple. Write paragraphs for comments. Then use either indented blocks or code fences to write code blocks.

Here is a simple example:

# Saying Hi

We want to write a little javascript command that says hi, waits one second,
and then says bye. We will save it in [teens.js](# "save:")

Greetings are great, right?

    console.log("hi");

Timer is in milliseconds, so 1000. We'll call the function `bye` defined
elsewhere

    setTimeout(bye, 1000);

And now let's define the bye function. For no apparent reason, we use a named
fence block. Hey, maybe we'll get some syntax highlighting!

```js
function bye () {
    console.log("bye");
}
```

Hey, we're all done!

With that text saved in a file, we can run litpro on it and it should produce the file teens.js consisting of

console.log("hi");
setTimeout(bye, 1000);
function bye () {
    console.log("bye");
}

This uses the save directive which is, at its simplest, [filename](# "save:") where filename is where to save the file. The hash symbol says to use the current section; we’ll see later how to reference other sections.