From: Nathaniel Talbott <nathaniel@...>
Date: 2004-10-16T07:41:21+09:00
Subject: Re: documentation as source

On Oct 15, 2004, at 11:03, Eivind Eklund wrote:

> For me:
> * My brain is conditioned to automatically "ignore" lines that start
> with # - they're there as documentation, but they are very clearly
> separate from code
> * They're automatically highlighted "away" in my editor.

Certainly possible complaints... but not enough to dissuade me from my 
course. I personally look forward to people being able to use these, 
because maybe more folks that are disinclined to write comments for 
their libraries will at least plunk some examples in to them. I 
personally would prefer a bit of working code over a comment that might 
or might not describe the method's behavior well. Also, it might help 
our Japanese friends to provide us with better documentation, since it 
could all be written in Ruby :-)


> So far, I prefer Florian's approach - however, it may be this works
> out OK in a highlighting editor (because def gets highlighted).  In
> black and white, Florian's is much easier to read, and less overhead,
> though.

I think that if folks did use this a lot, we would quickly learn to 
recognize it just like we recognize all the other things one can do 
dynamically in the class definition.

And for those that would prefer to do it in the inverse manner 
(comments becoming tests), they're certainly welcome to use Florian's 
library. Hopefully it will be even easier in test/unit2 for him to 
build the tests out of the comments.


Nathaniel
Terralien, Inc.

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