Re: doc snarfing does not work with Sun Forte preprocessor

[Michael Livshin]

Matthias Koeppe <address@hidden> writes:

> 2) guile-doc-snarf truncates lines in the preprocessed source to 1024
>    characters via cut before feeding it to the AWK script; therefore
>    the snarfer tags are cut off for long doc strings like the one
>    below.  The result is garbage in the doc strings. 
> 
>    Removing the truncation solves this problem for me, but I guess
>    there must have been a reason to introduce it (I haven't found a
>    note on this anywhere).

I introduced it to cope with Solaris nawk's (oh, the irony!) line
length limitation...

> I guess one should replace the preprocessor/awk snarfing method with a
> more robust Scheme implementation.  I see there is a scripts/doc-snarf
> file; shouldn't it be used to build the documentation files?  (There
> is no bootstrapping problem since one can run Guile directly from the
> build directory.)

well, yeah.

I guess it's OK to keep the preprocessor step, actually.  but awk
(along with all the other braindamaged Un*x utilities) should be spat
on, cut into little bits, jumped on, buried, dug out, and jumped on
again (anything else would be just extremism).

note that doing The Right Thing with the preprocessor output should
not be hard at all.  volonteers?

-- 
There is no such thing as a "great rock critic" any more than there are
"great parasites".            -- Mike Dickson, in rec.music.progressive