fdoc: a poor man's 'edoc', or, what I stole from Lisp

[Richard Carlsson]

On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Vlad Dumitrescu (EAW) wrote:

> > Just did a kinda fun hack. The idea is a semi-automatic documentation
> > system that:
> >
> >   1. Can be queried online
> >   2. Can find documentation by itself (nothing extra in Makefiles)
> >   3. Has a simple documentation syntax that looks good in source files
> >
> > Basically, Lisp "docstrings".
>
> Cool! It'd be super-cool if this was merged wit edoc, so that a
> describe could return a formatted edoc documentation. Well, not very
> useful in the shell, but in Emacs it could be handled nicely. Likewise
> maybe in Eclipse or even a future version of the Windows shell (or a
> Gnome/KDE shell).

I just want to inform you all that I am actually working on a new
version of edoc. I just had to put it on the shelf for a while.

The next release will not contain much in the way of new features, but
will be better structured, so that other applications (e.g. fdoc?) can
use edoc as a tool for getting the documentation in a well-defined
intermediate format, add your own layout engine, etc. It's also supposed
to be able to run edoc from a Makefile. (Thanks to Vlad D. and Johan B.
for their involvment.)

It's not quite there yet though...

By the way, I think the idea of picking up whatever comment happens to
appear before a function and show it as documentation is probably quite
a good thing for an interactive hacking environment. The point with
EDoc-markup is of course that your customers don't get to see things
like "FIXME: this implementation is total crap!!!" in the documentation.
:-)

	/Richard


Richard Carlsson (richardc@REDACTED)   (This space intentionally left blank.)
E-mail: Richard.Carlsson@REDACTED	WWW: http://user.it.uu.se/~richardc/