Re: Patches to run makeinfo on snarfed libguile docstrings

[Neil Jerram]

Dirk Herrmann writes:

   your diff output was truncated.  But, without having looked at the
   patches I can say that I like the produced result very much.

Thanks for the positive feedback.

   However, this brings me to a question that I have always wondered about:
   Currently, every comment line is terminated with `\n', which looks strange
   in the code, and makes writing and maintaining of comments painful.  I
   have never understood, why we were doing things this way, since a simple
   automatic line wrapping would have been easy to implement.

Yes - for example, makeinfo rewraps paragraphs automatically.

   If your solution is accepted, could we (please) get rid of all those `\n's
   in comments, and only use `\n' (or maybe `\n\n' to be tex conforming) to
   indicate a paragraph ending?

This would be quite easy to implement.  To indicate a paragraph break,
you could either leave a blank line like this:

   "Break a long sentence into paragraphs."
   ""
   "@example"
   "(break-sentence s)"
   "@end example"

or, to save valuable lines of code, use an explicit newline:

   "Break a long sentence into paragraphs.\n"
   "@example"
   "(break-sentence s)"
   "@end example"

But how does this line-breaking relate to the discussion that we had
on the list a few months ago?  We'd better go back and check the
archives first.  (I guess one disadvantage of taking out one newline
per line is that, if we ever wanted to use the ANSI C interpretation
of these strings, which just concatenates the strings, the
concatenation would be wrong.)

Regards,
        Neil