On Fri, 2009/04/10, julius <email@hidden> wrote:
So the upshot seems then to be that many people
have found it useful to include diagrams in their
inline documentation (surprise surprise) but
compiler writers have not thought to provide this
one tiny and simple to implement thing? Hmmm..
there must be reasons... I suggested it once to
BBEdit but they had no plans to do anything like
this.
Perhaps XCode could be the first?
All the bestJulius
There was something like that in Nisus Writer, and
we considered putting it into QUED/M but held off
for fear of bloat.
Another issue is that every such complication adds
opportunities for introduction of bugs. It's not
so "tiny", though doing it in an OO way should
improve the odds.
It's not so much the compiler that needs special
code for it, but the code editors. As far as the
compiler's concerned a comment is a comment.
If it's just another special comment for purposes
of documentation, we've had those in our version/
config management systems for several decades --
at least since the 1960s. We had some nice things
for laying out tables in memory and for data-comm
word by word and bit by bit which would get
printed as ASCII art. By the 1980s there were
some tools to produce nice pictures.
We just didn't have *good* ways to print/display
graphics and multimedia back then. And that's
the trick, to have the editor display it in the
file, and for editors that can't it's just another
comment with a link... and we'd still need to
protect that editor from malware, and make it
easy for the software developer to open up and
play/show or minimize such comments on the fly,
and minimize the performance impact.