Re: iff?

[Marius Vollmer]

Rob Browning <address@hidden> writes:

> Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > If this is too tricky, what about having a special form `doc' that
> > applies to the current body (via special recognition in
> > scm_m_expand_body).
> > 
> >     (define (foo)
> >       (doc
> >         :short "Foo around."
> >         "Foo around a little.")
> >       ...)
> 
> Clear designations like this seem good to me, though don't you have a
> problem with a function that calls a sub-function named doc?
> 
>   (define (doc x) ...)
> 
>   (define (foo)
>     (doc "Is this a doc string or not?"))

No, `doc' would just be binding, like `let' and `lambda'.  You could
overwrite it normally.

> An alternative would be to embed notation in the strings, [...]

I don't like that, stylistically.  We should use Lisp syntax for
markup, ideally.

Instead of `doc', we could just use `quote' and stay portable:

    (define (foo)
      '((summary "Foo around.")
        (main "Foo around a little."))
      ...)

  It would be a straight generalization of a docstring: a doclist.

Parsing this should be trivial compared to a SGMLish markup.  We
already use TeXinfo markup in the docstrings, so if anything we should
use TeXinfo style, I'd say.

    (define (foo)
      "@summary{Foo around.}
      Foo around a little."
      ...)

> Actually, what I'd *really* like is an easy way to have fill-paragraph
> work properly on the doc strings :>

Yes!  I didn't look carefully enough at what people have already
produced for Emacs, but maybe such a thing already exists?