On 3/22/2013 3:19 PM, Bill Meahan wrote:
On 03/22/2013 03:31 AM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
Hi All,
Maybe, we could setup a collaborative work group to do the documentation.
That is a group of us are responsible for certain groups of commands.
This way
the manuals can become more complete. That way some of the more advance
stuff that is hardly documented finally gets documented.
What we would need is a specification for:
[snip]
In 45+ years of programming[1] it has never ceased to amaze me how the
wheel has to be reinvented for every new system whether language, macro
package or whatever. Why do it again? Why not adopt some documentation
system that is already widely-used and for which infrastructure and
knowledge of use is already in place?
I have no investment in any particular system. I'm happily generating
other types of non-computer-related documents using reStructuredText
since I can easily convert that various publication formats as required
without separate source files for each format. It seems to me docutils
has everything that would be needed to document ConTeXt and is very
widely used given the popularity of Python (which makes me cringe). If
doxygen or something else would work better, so be it. The point is,
**use something that exists instead of expending time and effort
reinventing the wheel yet again!**
[1] I was, am and will be a "programmer" and not a "software developer"
or "software engineer." The term adequately depicts what I did/do while
the others are simply too pretentious. Find the old article "Real
Programmers Don't Use Pascal" in an archive somewhere -- I've been a
"real programmer" and I suspect Hans is, too. :)
Sorry for the rants but it is so frustrating to have to install so many
different language support and documentation systems simply because I
use FOSS tools exclusively.
I can only speak for myself, but
- I did my share of programming (pascal, modula 2) when I university but
at that time documentation was mostly in-source. My background is
educational technology and not programming but I always ended up doing
that. (I still have a stack of old listings somewhere of a formatter
that I wrote for vms that took some kind of tagged ascii and paginated
that etc.)
- Later on when I ended up in educational consultancy and development of
all kind of educational stuff, context was developed simply because we
needed a flexible typesetting tool. We also developed tools and
workflows around it. Ha, there was no internet, at least not for us, so
we didn't even know what else was around.
- So, whenever I have to write some documentation, I use context itself,
after all, one needs to typeset examples. I normally pay a lot of
attention to the document source code and can live with some tagging. If
I had to do that in some * ** == -- & based ascii text format or
whatever, I'd probably never write manuals (too much hassle to go beyond
the obvious and not looking nice either, but that's personal).
- When I started with the command specification in xml, it was also
because xml is easy to process, and (in mkiv) we can also easily filter
based on expresssions. So, for that xml is quite natural for me. Just as
nowadays lua is my natural choice and most of my current docs are a mix
of mp, lua and tex, also depending on what looks nicest in document source.
- I happily leave additional documentation to others and whoever does
that should should the tools he/she likes most. In these days one can
always convert.
- But, to come back to your last comment: tex can typeset its own
documentation so that's a rather natural choice for part of it.
Hans
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
| www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the
Wiki!
maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________
