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

[Robert P. Goldman]

It probably wouldn't be at all hard to cargo-cult together something that 
would work with ELI's inferior lisp.

I use the existing eli interface to documentation now. It's never been 
totally satisfactory, of course, mostly because the CL documentation 
facility doesn't have an obvious extension  path.

I suggested the backend to DOCUMENTATION as a way to allow un-enhanced 
environments to get the benefits of your enhanced docs. 

Sneaking off from family events to think about CL,
r
___
Robert P. Goldman
Principal Scientist, SIFT, LLC
www.sift.info

...... Original Message .......
On Sun, 28 Dec 2008 20:16:10 +0100 "David Lichteblau" 
<david at lichteblau.com> wrote:
>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.