Re: Suggestion: new snarf macro set

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj at mdj dot nada dot kth dot se>]

Dirk Herrmann <dirk@ida.ing.tu-bs.de> writes:

> On 25 May 2000, Mikael Djurfeldt wrote:
> 
> > So, while the Guile maintainers are strongly dedicated to cleaning up
> > Guile's interface, this is not the time to do it.  Right now, we need
> > to focus on those major things that will complete Guile's first phase
> > of development:
> > 
> > * Guile reference manual
> 
> However, in order to do this, we somehow have to extend the current
> documentation mechanisms.  Currently, to name a single example, we cannot
> document generic functions, since there is no snarfing macro which allows
> us to do so.  While I was restructuring functions in numbers.c I more than
> once _wanted_ to add documentation, but the snarfing macros didn't allow
> me to.
> 
> Another question is:  Didn't the snarfing macros change anyway between the
> last release and now?  I think in 1.3.4 there were no macros for
> documenting functions anyway, so we are not backwards compatible anyway
> with respect to these.

Well, we added the SCM_DEFINE macro and a few others.  SCM_DEFINE
replaces SCM_PROC (which is not yet deprecated) so in that sense we
have changed them.

The major problem with the new proposal is that it is a new complete
set of macros, a set which is designed before we know how it finally
need to look like.  If we introduce that set now, it's very likely
that we'll have two major changes of the snarf macros instead of one.

But it is of course important to be able to add documentation.

While I'm strongly against making a new full set of snarf macros now,
I'm not sure what we should do about docstrings.

Can't we at least wait until GOOPS and the environments have been
merged?  That should be only a few weeks.