Erlang Development Environment

[Peter Andersson]

Sean Hinde wrote:
> 
> Peter,
> 
> > I was going to
> > change it to process marked up source instead, but I didn't
> > get to it yet. I
> > also thought I'd change it to actually resemble unix man, but
> > now I feel it'd be
> > more useful to make it into something that could be
> > integrated with your
> > code_finder. It (my hack that is) needs a rewrite rather than
> > an update for
> > this, though. I'll have a look at it next week if you like.
> 
> If you fancy having a go - it looks to be highly non trivial to deal with
> nroff macros. The much better solution would be to store this stuff as
> searchable indexed xml - which could be generated from the SGML sources (if
> we had them :( ).
> 
> - Sean
> 

I just had a look at some nroff/troff reference pages on the web and you're
right, writing a processor for the complete specification is probably not, well,
feasible! :) 

Perhaps an idea would be to only handle the subset of nroff being used by the
Erlang man pages. Browsing through a few pages, it doesn't seem to be very large
(a script could list all commands). Also, it could ignore commands it doesn't
understand in the hope that, in the future, it might still be able to produce
correct information. (Ok, I guess, if it can assume unknown commands are used
for, say, text formatting and indentation. But if e.g. conditional statements
are introduced, then it'll be completely screwed!).

Maybe the HTML documentation will actually be easier to use as source (to be
translated into a search index and plain text)?

Comments or ideas anyone?

Regards

  /Peter