Re: literate programming

[Nic Ferrier]

Andy Wingo <address@hidden> writes:

> 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).

Ah I see, your system is dynamic.

Like the emacs manual says, I think dynamic, runtime documentation
probably has a different scope to doc for a manual.

I like your idea, it's neat.


Nic