[mercury-users] Custom declarations and preprocessors.

[Tyson Dowd]

On 14-Apr-2000, Peter Schachte <schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 14, 2000 at 11:32:03AM +0200, Manuel Hermenegildo wrote:
> > 
> > Peter makes some valid points: there are indeed advantages to literate
> > programming using comments but there are also advantages to such
> > comments being declarations.
> 
> Other than being easier to implement, which I concede, what are the
> advantages of declarations over comments for plain text documentation?

This isn't plain text documentation.  This is structured documentation.
You can keep plain text documentation wherever you like (a literate
source file is the nicest way).

But there aren't a lot of advantages.  The main one I like is that if
you want to migrate an optional add-on documentation system into the
main development enviornment, it's a lot neater to simply add a new
section to the user's manual.

If you implement it in comments, then you have to make comments part of
the language.  

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # 
                            #  Surreal humour isn't everyone's cup of fur.
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        # 
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd #
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