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Re: literate programming


From: Andy Wingo
Subject: Re: literate programming
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 10:22:59 +0100

On Mon, 2004-07-26 at 14:23 +0100, Nic Ferrier wrote:
> Aubrey Jaffer has got an SLIB based texinfo generator that works
> really well:
> 
> http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/slib_4.html#SEC86

True.

But why syntactically parse a file when guile has all of the information
already, at runtime? Indeed, it has more information -- the type of
variables (including classes and methods) regardless of how they were
defined, and the complete export list of a module (so you can be sure
you're documenting the whole thing).

Aside from that, looking at texinfo at runtime isn't so nice. Better if
it's made into text, like the output of info. (texinfo) will parse it,
(texinfo plain-text) will render the docs to text, so you can call
`help' on an object. Also, (gnome contrib texinfo-buffer) will render it
to a GtkTextBuffer, so you can read it online, even if some of the docs
were programmatically constructed *at runtime* (certainly the case for
systems that dynamically load plugins).

Regards,
-- 
Andy Wingo <address@hidden>
http://ambient.2y.net/wingo/




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