Re: iff?

[Marius Vollmer]

Jim Blandy <address@hidden> writes:

> Rob Browning <address@hidden> writes:
> > And that may be a property worth trying to preserve.  What about
> > something like
> > 
> >   (foo x) returns true if x is foo-like, #f otherwise.
> 
> If you can fit it, more power to you.
> 
> It's worth pointing out that the maintainers have to agree that this
> first-line-summary thing is a good policy,

Do we agree?  I have no experience with Emacs.

In any case, how about extending the documentation system of Guile so
that it allows more explicit structure in the documentation than just
a single string.  Neil proposed something along this line previously,
I think.

We could then have an explicit short text for `apropos', and a longer
one for `help'.  Guile would then know when a short text is available
and people would know that they can provide such a thing (and how to
do it) by looking at existing documentation.

Like

    (define (foo)
      :short "Foo around."
      "Foo around a little."
      ...)

If this is too tricky, what about having a special form `doc' that
applies to the current body (via special recognition in
scm_m_expand_body).

    (define (foo)
      (doc
        :short "Foo around."
        "Foo around a little.")
      ...)