Re: Header documentation script

Hi!

18 jan 2007 kl. 06.17 skrev Vic Bancroft:

>> I've tried to look for it in the CVS repository but can't find  
>> any  obviously evidence of any such script. I have the feeling  
>> that for  some years ago I read about this somewhere and somehow,  
>> but can't  find it now.
>
> The winConfigure.pl script does several things; one of which is the  
> header file transformation,


Aha, that was the case...  :-)

> This a full filled example of what has been called 'literate  
> programming'   . . .
>
>    "The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature,
>    addressed to human beings rather than to a computer. The program is
>    also viewed as a hypertext document, rather like the World Wide  
> Web."    -- Knuth [1]
>
>> I'm asking because I thought about using the library's nice and   
>> gentle comment style in other projects, instead of the doxygen style.
>
> It is interesting the effect of text which is conciously intended  
> for another human being.

This was something interesting and news to me. One never stops to  
learning, as they say...

Even though I'll have to use autodoc for practical reasons at the  
moment, this principle sounds cool (consider the object-oriented  
principle of encapsulation that basically says that interface and  
implementation should be separated so that changing the  
implementation does not change the interface.)

Are you aware of other projects that use similar technique for  
generating the interface?

 From a practical viewpoint the program is partly specified in a  
manifest, and the interface is generated from a manifest. This  
translation would really correspond to a macro language that reads  
inputs, separates attributes, and then generates output. Is libwww  
the first to realise this paradigm, or is there any other projects  
that do this? (And besides Xml Stylesheet Language XSL that does this  
at runtime.) A macro language that performs substitutions on  
attributes basis can be compared to m4, that performs substitution on  
token or postfix basis.

Received on Monday, 22 January 2007 00:39:37 UTC