From: mathew <meta@...>
Date: 2005-10-29T05:07:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Format BigDecimal

Dave Burt wrote:
> Now, a question to you guys: how would a prospective documenter pick a 
> module to start on? Would one start at the Status Report?
> http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/status.html

I pick based on things I'm interested in and knowledgeable about, with a 
preference for things I don't think anyone else is likely to document.

I started with net/http and net/ftp because I needed to use them myself; 
I skipped net/imap because I don't know the protocol at all. Next I 
picked fcntl, because I guessed that the number of people who had 
actually used system file descriptors on Unix, were writing Ruby code, 
and could also write in plain English, was probably fairly small.

BigDecimal is next because the stupidity of fixed-width binary 
representations of floating point is one of my pet peeves. It made sense 
when computers ran at 1MHz and had 4K of RAM, but really, isn't it time 
we wrote our code to actually give the right answers?

On the other hand, I won't be touching 'Win32API'. I started on 'rss', 
but decided I didn't like the code and ended up writing a replacement 
instead and documenting that. (It's on RubyForge.)

Don't forget to look at the documented packages too. In some cases the 
ruby-doc.org maintainers are more generous than me about what they 
consider "well documented".


mathew
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