Re: Will the availability of browsers affect source code?

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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