On 1/24/11 2:15 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 1/24/11 1:50 PM, Jens Mueller wrote:
Jonathan M Davis wrote:
I think that it's been discussed a time or two, but nothing has been
done about
it. It wouldn't be entirely straightforward to do. Essentially, either a
unittest block would have to be generated from the Examples section
in the
documentation, or you'd have to have some way to indicate that a
particular
unittest block got put into the documentation as an Examples section.
It's
certainly true that it would be ideal to have a way to avoid the
duplication,
but we don't have one at the moment, and it hasn't yet been a high
enough
priority to sort out how to do it and implement it.
I see. I understand that it does not have high priority. Just wondered
whether ...
Jens
The change is much simpler than what Jonathan suggests. A change can be
made such that any unittest preceded by a documentation comment is
automatically considered an example.
/**
Example:
*/
unittest
{
writeln("This is how it works.");
}
Andrei
BTW I consider this a very important topic. We have _plenty_ of examples
that don't work and are not mechanically verifiable. The reasons range
from minor typos to language changes to implementation limitations.
Generally this is what they call "documentation rot". This is terrible
PR for the language.
Changing ddoc to recognize documentation unittests would fix this matter
once and forever.
Last but not least, the "----" separators for code samples are awful
because no editor recognizes them for anything - they confuse the hell
out of Emacs for one thing.
Andrei
