From: Alexander Kellett <ruby-lists@...>
Date: 2004-10-12T17:30:51+09:00
Subject: Re: documentation as source

On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 11:59:02AM +0900, Randy W. Sims wrote:
> 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.

one thing i'd like to have in ruvi is good integration
with the version control systems. this includes the ability
to mark sections of documentation (and possibly there 
dependancies if they are documented) as persistantly 
invalidated when code is changed. i'd like this system 
to be used for testcasing also, so a dependancy tree
between the testcases and the code they test is constructed,
therefore testcases that should possibly be added to could
be highlighted. really experimental stuff. it'll be years
before i get anything working nicely i guess. but its one
of the big aims :)

mvg,
Alex