[ruby-talk:14633] Re: Some ideas on collaboration

On Thursday 03 May 2001 22:39, Chris Moline wrote:
> I have just been thinking about the thread that is carrying on here about
> someones about the need for a tool that's like the wiki but not the wiki.
> And I was thinking how about the mailing list?? Most mail servers come with
> commands such as lists and help for majordomo. How about we add some
> commands to the ruby-talk server( it's written in ruby right?? ) such as
> "code"( to browse the code snippets ). There would be commands for
> organizing them, selecting only specific code, code that behaves in a
> certia way( does a specific task ), code that uses a certain
> function/feature, commands to retrieve the dicussion surrounding it,
> functionality similar to the wiki, etc. It might be better to use a client
> to for some of this fuctionality though. Best of all, it's all in one
> place. ie we don't have to leave the list. I can just sit at my ruby-talk
> client and collaboate and dicuss, etc. What do you think?? Too much work??
> Not such a great idea??
>
> Sincerly,
> Chris Moline

Normally, my experience wouldcause me to say "Accck...waaaay to much work!"

Code embedded into e-mail can be tons of work to extact _unless_ some _very_ 
strict conventions are followed. Ruby, in conjunction with RD vastly 
simplifies things, however. Two conventios:

(1) code section starts with =begin and ends with end
(2) first line(s) after =begin is comment stating what code does (shold do?)

so ...

=begin
# Pint 'Hello World'
puts 'Hellow World'
=end

would be easy to exract as a block.  Using Rubicon, the system could even be 
made to test the code block and either post it or send it back to the author, 
with (if some more work were put into this) comments and suggestions :-)

(This might require a 3rd convention, say a # before the =end line to the 
effect:

# prints "Hello World"

Anyway, I can see it in my head. :-)

BTW yes, I jnow there is Javadoc, JUnit, etc. and perldoc; but we're talking 
Ruy here, right?

Regards.

Kent Starr
[e-mail]