There seems to be some agreement at least that a clean and unintrusive
syntax like POD or the ISE Eiffel stuff is preferable to something as
noisy as XML; it certainly seems to me that it would be much more
rapidly adopted. Regarding such a system's power,
Jan Skibinski writes:
> How come ISE Eiffel tools can handle all of this so
> nicely from a clean ascii, readable source code? As far
[.. description of lots of neat things it generates automatically
from minimal additional comment conventions elided ..]
> The only help a programmer gives to the Eiifel tools
> is a bit of self-discipline. Location of comments.
> Obligatory class comments. Preconditions and postconditions
> that help to clarify the intended usage of the methods.
> Licencing garbage at the bottom, not at the front of
> the file. Well thought of comments: concise and clear.
Jan... could you write up a proposal for such a system for Haskell,
with
1. The exact requirements (the comment conventions the programmer
must observe), and
2. A list of what could be automatically generated by a system
utilising these.
If we had a concrete proposal for something simple and usable, I'm
sure all of us here on the Haskell list would be happy to thrash out
the bugs and maybe go away and implement some of it.
Regards,
--KW 8-)
