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List:       ruby-talk
Subject:    Re: Google Summer of Code -- Get Ready for the Proposal Window
From:       Rich Morin <rdm () cfcl ! com>
Date:       2007-03-14 17:03:21
Message-ID: p06230987c21de78b7eee () [192 ! 168 ! 1 ! 205]
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At 12:14 AM +0900 3/15/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Another thing I'd like to see come out of Google Summer of Code
> would be (and this is somewhat language-independent) some tools
> like those described in "Generative Programming" -- tools that
> work at the  syntactic and semantic level rather than at the
> surface syntax level.  There are some core concepts just about
> all "modern" languages have --  integer and floating point and
> string data types, regular expressions, arrays and hashes,
> classes and objects and methods. A tool that could manipulate a
> graphical version of a program, such as a parse tree, and  then
> reconstruct the source code from that is something I'd use daily.

On a similar note, I'd like to see someone look into creating an
abstract description format (e.g., in XML or YAML) for use by the
dozens of "documentation generators" I see listed on Wikipedia:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_generators

Most of these programs parse one or more languages, then present the
result in HTML (etc).  Almost none of them are willing to output the
collected information in a machine-friendly format, let alone accept
such information from another source.

-r
-- 
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm            Rich Morin
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume     rdm@cfcl.com
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog     +1 650-873-7841

Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development

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