From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2004-10-12T16:14:39+09:00
Subject: Re: documentation as source


"Randy W. Sims" <ml-ruby@thepierianspring.org> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:416B486B.3020102@thepierianspring.org...
> Are there any Ruby modules that allow documentation to act as source
> code? I was thinking of the problem of how souce code sometimes diverge
> from its documentation. So maybe there could be a way to specify the
> interface: the number of arguments and their types in the documentation,
> and possibly pre- and post-conditions, and then the documentation would
> be turned into code at runtime. I guess this would be implemented
> something like Perl's source filters[1]. Possibly some constants and
> such could be defined this way as well, version numbers, etc.
>
> I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not; I haven't completely thought
> it through. It seems like I've read about this being done before in some
> other langage, but a brief search hasn't turned up anything.
>
> Any thoughts?

Two things come to mind:

1. literate programming (as others have mentioned already): there was a
recent thread here about the topic.

2. design by contract (DbC): there is a (experimental?) implementation of
DbC - I think by Andy Hunt.

Kind regards

    robert

>
> Randy.
>
> 1. <http://perldoc.com/perl5.8.4/pod/perlfilter.html>
>
>
>