From: "Sean E. Russell" <ser@...>
Date: 2004-02-13T01:19:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Standard libraries


--Boundary-02=_8d6KA0tpjDpO6LV
Content-Type: text/plain;
  charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: inline

(Dave Thomas: there's a question for you in the second paragraph; if you're=
=20
not following this thread, would you please at least scan that paragraph? =
=20
Thanks!)

On Thursday 12 February 2004 09:59, Gavin Sinclair wrote:
=2E..
> > Basically, the code duplication that Hiroshi is complaining about is
> > required for good documentation, because there's no other way of
=2E..
> Good points, but I don't see the light overall.
>
> Method documentation is neccesary to help people understand the code -
> I agree.  Without type information it can be hard to understand a
> method at a glance.

Sorry, I wasn't being clear.  I was trying to say that Hiroshi doesn't like=
=20
code duplication, but there is no way to avoid the kind of duplication he's=
=20
complaining about because there's no other way to extract that information=
=20
automatically.  Ergo, if you want good documentation, you'll *have* to have=
 a=20
certain amount of duplication -- although, I wouldn't call it duplication;=
=20
I'd call it documenting constraints.  Even so, it *is* difficult to keep=20
those constraints in sync.

I remember having a discussion with Dave about the possibility of having rd=
oc=20
extract constraints from the documentation and generating or running them i=
n=20
the form of unit tests.  Dave, I'm a bit out of touch with what you're up t=
o=20
these days; have you given this any more thought?

Also, since I'm a lazy cuss, does anybody know what the consequenses of hav=
ing=20
Ruby source files that consist of enormous amounts of comments is?  I'm=20
assuming that the parsing out of comments would add a not inconsiderate=20
amount of time to the loading of files, but since that only happens once pe=
r=20
run, can it be ignored?   I'm just imagining some literate programming styl=
e=20
that's 90% comments, and wondering what the overhead would be considering t=
he=20
dynamic nature of Ruby.

=2D-=20
### SER  =20
### Deutsch|Esperanto|Francaise|Linux|XML|Java|Ruby|Aikido
### http://www.germane-software.com/~ser  jabber.com:ser  ICQ:83578737=20
### GPG: http://www.germane-software.com/~ser/Security/ser_public.gpg

--Boundary-02=_8d6KA0tpjDpO6LV
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Description: signature

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQBAK6d8P0KxygnleI8RAhXqAKCvUXQZKbvWcciD5Bwhg+5OGNytegCfR/jy
Lu493f6YP+lfELIiPeSeiqo=
=OunM
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--Boundary-02=_8d6KA0tpjDpO6LV--