Re: generating a manual from annotations in source code

[Clark McGrew <mcgrew@ale.physics.sunysb.edu>]

>>>>> "Gary" == Gary V Vaughan <gvaughan@oranda.demon.co.uk> writes:

    Gary> Clark McGrew wrote:
    >> I would like to see a documentation property attached to both
    >> scheme and primitive functions (and compiled into the
    >> executable).

    Gary> I would tend to think this adds unnecessary bload to the
    Gary> binary, and would mean that the doc strings for subr's
    Gary> (implemented in C) and (in the future) byte-compiled scheme
    Gary> functions would be stored (and thus accessed, wrt lookup
    Gary> code) differently.

I don't quite follow why the docstrings would be stored differently.
Can't any object have a property?  For lambda objects, the
documentation property has the docstring.  Can't primitives
have a documentation property?  I'm not familiar with the internals of
the property code, so there's probably a technical reason I don't know
about.

I'd like to see docstrings compiled into the executable since it
minimizes the number of files that need to be installed.  Imagine for
a moment an application the is extended by GUILE, but that doesn't
load any scheme files (ie. everything is implemented as a primitive).
I want to copy the exe to "joe user" without having to install a lot
of extra files, but I want include the doc-strings.  It's nice when
you're able to point somebody at an EXE and say, "copy and run this on
your machine."

Cheers,

Clark