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Date:Mon Sep 18 12:44:20 2003 
Subject:Re: help system - ideas wanted 
From:d . j . gurnell 
Volume-ID:1030918.01 

If Spice is a language that ties in closely with XML and HTML, wouldn't 
it be sensible / useful to develop an XML-based doc tagging system? That 
way your REF files could be totally automatically generated. If fact, 
you could extract the relevant XML and pass it through a bunch of XSLT 
translators to produce any manner of documentation you want.

Javadoc is the obvious (non-XML) equivalent. An XML version is available 
for MS Visual Studion (inc. C++):
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/06/xmlc/default.aspx

Anyway, my point is that with a bit of imagination you can probably 
auto-generate REF, TEACH and EXAMPLE documentation straight from source 
code with a couple of helper files (like the package-summary.html (??) 
file that adds documentation to a package in Java).

It might be nice to allow the user to choose to inline their 
documentation or store it in a parallel file. Sometimes I get fed up 
scrolling through all the doc sat in the middle of my code.

Dave