[comp.lang.c++] Class documentation -- invitation for discussion.

beshers@division.cs.columbia.edu (Clifford Beshers) (03/19/90)

I would like to see discussion on the current and future state of
standard class documentation formats and construction/maintenance
tools.

I have seen a tool for creating graphic representations of class
hierarchies directly from code, but I haven't seen any standard
format for textual descriptions of classes.

What do people use currently, and what would they like to see?


--
-----------------------------------------------
Clifford Beshers
450 Computer Science Department
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027
beshers@cs.columbia.edu

gjditchfield@watmsg.waterloo.edu (Glen Ditchfield) (03/20/90)

I would like class documentation to start with a "synopsis" section, which
would be just the class declaration with "private" sections and inline
function bodies stripped out (and possibly "inline" keywords and private
inheritance clauses stripped, since these are arguably implementation
details).  I used to have an ugly lex script that created such things from
.h files...
   When I look at documentation, I usually just want to remind myself what
the name of a function was, or what order the parameters go in.

fishkin@pixar.UUCP (Ken Fishkin) (03/22/90)

In article <BESHERS.90Mar18161436@division.cs.columbia.edu> beshers@division.cs.columbia.edu (Clifford Beshers) writes:
]I would like to see discussion on the current and future state of
]standard class documentation formats and construction/maintenance
]tools.
]
]I have seen a tool for creating graphic representations of class
]hierarchies directly from code, but I haven't seen any standard
]format for textual descriptions of classes.

    I've seen two programs posted to the net to do this.
"classdoc", was written by Dag Michael Bruck (dag@control.lth.se), and
posted to this group.
"genman" was written by Bab Mastors (...palladium!bby), and posted
to comp.sources.misc.

    We haven't used "genman" yet. "classdoc" we use, and it produces
a pretty reasonable first-order man page (we've hacked it do to better
on processing comments).
-- 
Ken Fishkin	...ucbvax!pixar!fishkin