Re: What's going on?

[Tom Lord]

       Guile often gives a bad first impression. The documentation has
       been sparse, and the startup time is pretty bad.

I wish I could say that Systas documentation was better, but it isn't
-- I haven't had time, and haven't decided yet whether or not to 
continue working on Systas, start submitting patches to Guile, start a
new interpreter, or some combination of those strategies.

Nevertheless, what Systas documentation there is is a breeze to
maintain, thanks to my handy-dandy documentation-comment extractor.

Easy-to-read comments and easy-to-edit function defintions, like this:


    /*(c eq?)
     * (eq? . args)
     * SCM scm_eq_p (SCM x, SCM y);
     * 
     * Return `#t' if all of the arguments are one-in-the-same object,
     * otherwise return `#f'.
     * 
     * Note that the C function `scm_eq_p' takes exactly two arguments.
     */
    SCM_PROC1 (s_eq_p, "eq?", scm_tc7_rpsubr, scm_eq_p);
    SCM
    scm_eq_p (SCM x, SCM y)
    {
      SCM_INTS_INDIFFERENT;
    
      return ((x==y)
              ? SCM_BOOL_T
              : SCM_BOOL_F);
    }
    
    
Turn into HTML (and similar texinfo) like this:

        http://www.regexps.com/manual/systas-scheme/html/eq.html#index-pt:0

Note that the header of the documentation comment is automagically
generated by an emacs command (which could be improved further).

Often, I just use "M-x find-tag" to look up documentation for a
built-in procedure.

-t