[mercury-users] Custom declarations and preprocessors.

[Peter Schachte]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2000 at 04:39:08PM +1000, Tyson Dowd wrote:

> Anthony Senyard <anthls at cs.mu.oz.au> is working on a Mercury
> documentation tool that allows
> 
> 	:- doc(predname/arity, "Some comment about the predicate").

It seems more natural to me to put this kind of documentation in the source
file as a comment, rather than as part of the langauge syntax.  Firstly,
it's more natural to programmers to do it this way, and secondly, you don't
need to mess about with teaching Mercury tools (in the long run, it won't
just be the compiler) to ignore these.

I've got a (big ugly) perl script that produces .html or latex or plain text
or .texinfo files documenting interfaces of modules, extracting the text
from code and comments in Mercury source files.  It even produced various
hot links among modules and index and contents pages.  The idea was to
produce a much prettier library manual as well as a hotlinked online manual,
like javadoc does.  It mostly worked a couple of years ago, but it had some
bugs, and several new Mercury features need to be accomodated.

Wrapping this up and submitting it has been on my to do list for the last
couple of years, and it's not getting any closer to the top of the list
:-(.  I'm happy to hand it over to anyone who'd like to fix it up or rewrite
it.

-- 
Peter Schachte                     One thing's for sure: if we keep doing
mailto:schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        what we're doing, we're going to keep
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/  getting what we're getting.
Phone:  +61 3 8344 9166                -- Stephen Covey, et al. 
Fax:    +61 3 9348 1184            
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