[e-lang] edoc

[Mark S. Miller]

At 04:15 AM 5/17/2004  Monday, James Graves wrote:
>I finally found some time to look through edoc.
>
>Unfortunately, it seems there are only about 6 files which aren't
>tainted by the SCSL.  That doesn't really leave much code left.

If I remember right, the interesting logic of edoc is in those files. 
edoc doesn't have much logic since it doesn't really do that much. Javadoc 
does most of the work.


>It seems it may be better to just re-do the whole thing from scratch. 
>There's a couple main choices for implementation language: Java or E.
>
>If we go the Java route, SinjDoc seems to have progressed a bit
>since MarkM might have last looked at it:
>
>    http://cscott.net/Projects/GJ/#sinjdoc
>
>So we might want to start from that as a base.  It is GPL, BTW.  Is that
>OK, or did we want a less restrictive license?

The 0.5 version of sinjdoc (the current one at the moment) is the one I 
looked at. It looks good to me.

GPL is a potentially serious problem, since the heart of the current 
E-on-Java implementation is covered by MPL, and the two are link 
incompatible (or something). However, this should not prevent us from 
building and running your new edoc as a separate program, which is how I ran 
the old edoc, in order to avoid SCSL contamination.


>And the other thing to do might be to just write the whole thing in E.
>
>That might be an interesting exercise, and perhaps the first step
>towards getting E more self-hosted.

This would be a substantial effort, but if you're willing to, the result 
would be much better for us. In particular, this would enable us to use the 
same code base for offline and online help.

Because a javadoc-like program is such a big job, perhaps you should at 
least do the first prototype using Sinjdoc? Once we have something working, 
we can reevaluate from there. How's that sound?


-- 
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

        Cheers,
        --MarkM