Re: Will the availability of browsers affect source code?

Roger Barnett <Roger@natron.demon.co.uk>
Mon, 8 May 1995 20:11:45 GMT

          From comp.compilers

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[2 earlier articles]
Re: Will the availability of browsers affect source code? preston@cs.rice.edu (1995-04-29)
Re: Will the availability of browsers affect source code? astor@onyx.stud.unit.no (1995-04-29)
Re: Will the availability of browsers affect source code? norman@flaubert.bellcore.com (1995-05-01)
Re: Will the availability of browsers affect source code? jeremy@sw.oz.au (1995-05-01)
Will the availability of browsers affect source code? Dave@occl-cam.demon.co.uk (Dave Lloyd) (1995-05-09)
Re: Will the availability of browsers affect source code? bernecky@eecg.toronto.edu (1995-05-11)
Re: Will the availability of browsers affect source code? Roger@natron.demon.co.uk (Roger Barnett) (1995-05-08)
Re: Will the availability of browsers affect source code? tculver@math.duke.edu (1995-05-09)
Re: Will the availability of browsers affect source code? lkaplan@BIX.com (1995-05-11)
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Newsgroups: comp.compilers
From: Roger Barnett <Roger@natron.demon.co.uk>
Keywords: design, syntax
Organization: Natron Software Maintenance Ltd
References: 95-05-022
Date: Mon, 8 May 1995 20:11:45 GMT

jeremy@sw.oz.au (Jeremy Fitzhardinge) writes:
> Well, Sun's new language Java, which was designed to be a language which
> can be safely run in web browsers, has a special comment form from which
> documentation can be automatically generated.
> The contents of the comment are, by convention, in HTML, along with
> some other markup with a different syntax. The documentation generator
> makes a set of web pages with cross references as anchors, etc, using
> other imbedded commands.
[snip]


The LSE/SCA product for Digital VMS systems has supported this kind
of thing since the mid 80s for any language, normally using the
appropriate compiler to extract the information into a database and
SCA to generate the "report" file in one of various formats; since
this latter stage is user programmable (in TPU) has anyone produced
an HTML version yet ?




> Despite all this, I think the overall quality of comments won't be
> improved just by having more powerful mechanisms.


Too true !


I personally find the interactive navigation aspects of source
browsers (open a new window showing where this item is declared/used,
list where items of this type are defined, etc) to be more useful
than the generation of documentation; the latter is most useful when
taking a fairly high-level view of a system, including whys as well
as hows, and such things are often less easy to extract from the
source code.


--
Roger Barnett
Natron Software Maintenance Ltd, York, England
--


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