[Xotcl] Re: [Xotcl] Some fixes to xodoc

[Uwe Zdun]

On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Kristoffer Lawson wrote:

> 
> Attached to this post I have a slightly fixed version of xodoc. 

 great 
 
 ...

> What I didn't do:
> 
> I was going to add an extension facility so that applications could
> specify their own handler-objects for certain special sections. Like in
> Class Foo above I might have a section {Attribute Aliases} in addition to
> errorCodes (as I do). I would like to specify a AttrAliasDocHandle object,
> for example, which would have the method "toHtml" (if outputting HTML)
> that gets called when the section {Attribute Aliases} is encountered, with
> the data passed to it as an argument. This would then return a nice HTML
> table documenting my aliases.
> 
> The syntax to create an extension might be something like this:
> 
> @ @DocExtension Class {Attribute Aliases} AttrAliasDocHandle
> 

Hi Kristoffer,
 
FYI just a short note in response: I didn't make it to look into the xodoc
issues yet (sigh) and probably won't make it this year :) I just want to
let you know that we were discussing to extend the basic mechanism, that
xodoc+makeDoc use, to a more generic framework for conditional &
customized parsing. There are several application which require similar
facilities. The extension facility that you propose is one important
ingredient.

one general aim is to use the introspection facilities as much as possible
without really executing the program (but only parts of it, like 
namespace in xodoc+makedoc). That way we can build for instance a
graphical representation as documentation of a script ... as oppossed to a
graphical documentation of a running script. So having such callback
handler objects (as you propose for the HTML table representation), would
also be important to build such documentation visualizations.

--Uwe



Uwe Zdun 
Specification of Software Systems, University of Essen 
Phone: +49 201 81 00 332, Fax: +49 201 81 00 398 
zdun at xotcl.org, uwe.zdun at uni-essen.de