From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2001-08-25T08:29:13+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:20323] Re: DocStrings

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:20264] Re: DocStrings"
    on 01/08/24, Ed Sinjiashvili <edsin@swes.saren.ru> writes:

|> I think it's the responsibility of tools like IDE or ri.  Have you
|> ever use ri by Dave Thomas?
|No, I haven't, but as I got from your and other posts it's some kind
|of man system.

Yes, indeed.  Docstring is for man (or woman), so that - I think -
interpreter itself does not need to have them.  Lisp (including Emacs)
and Smalltalk have interactive environment built in.  Docstrings is
useful in such systems.  Ruby is not.  For example, in daemon program
written in Ruby, docstrings are nothing but memory burden.

I know nothing about SPARK parser generator, but I feel it doesn't
have to be docstring.  There can be other way to implement similar
thing without docstring.

							matz.