RE: DocBook function synopsis

["Frank A. Christoph" <christo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>> I added three attributes to FuncDef in the declaration subset, "Class"
which
>> indicates what class the function is a member of (I'm not using it, but
it
>> seems potentially useful); "Dispatch" which would be "pure" for pure
virtual
>> functions, "virtual" for regular dynamically dispatched functions, and
>> "static" for statically dispatched functions; and finally "Const" which
is
>> "const" for functions that don't modify the state, or "mutable" for those
>> that do.
>
>I'm not sure if this breaks the spirit of DocBook but I'm sure this is not
>scalable enough to handle any other language than C and C++.
>I already had this problem with DocBook when I wrote some Java classes
>documentation using it as a base DTD. Think of how you would define that
the
>function throws an exception.

Of course.  It's not intended to handle the general case.  It's not even
sufficient to handle C++ very well, since there should at least be a way of
making a class synopsis.

>I think a good solution would have to start from the grammars of the
various
>targeted languages and extract some generic pieces of information in a
>function declaration to define the appropriate elements (not attributes) in
a
><funcsynopsis>.

Yes, but then you need something equivalent to a pretty printer and the
situation becomes much more complex.  One advantage of the current
representation is that you don't have to deal with the deranged concrete
syntax that C has for types.

Even if I thought it were possible, I don't think it's worthwhile to
generalize the situation to the point where every language could be encoded.
But, granted, providing support for C, C++ and Java is a worthy goal.

--FC



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