[editor-hints-devel] My thoughts about markup and docstrings

[David Lichteblau]

Quoting Robert Goldman (rpgoldman at sift.info):
> As someone who uses ELI more than SLIME, still, I would prefer to see a
> technique that extended the existing documentation facility, rather than
> supplanting it and dictating a particular development environment.

Perhaps it would be helpful to understand how are you using ELI to view
docstrings.

Are you calling DOCUMENTATION in the listener manually?

Using DESCRIBE manually?  DESCRIBE through a keybinding?

I'm asking because I never found the commands available to view
docstrings particularly convenient before (neither in ELI nor in SLIME).

So part of why I'm looking forward to something entirely new is that the
"old way" didn't work very well for me anyway.

If you're calling DOCUMENTATION or DESCRIBE manually, would alternative
versions of those functions available in parse-docstrings be useful?

Perhaps we should really rename the function that returns CLOS objects
to STRUCTURED-DOCUMENTATION, and offer a function DOCUMENTATION* that
returns a plaintext rendering of the markup.


d.