From: matt <matt@...>
Date: 2007-01-14T03:50:15+09:00
Subject: Re: RDoc Improvement Request

On Sun, 2007-01-14 at 03:33 +0900, Felipe Navas wrote:
> On 1/13/07, James Britt <james.britt@gmail.com> wrote:
> > matt wrote:
> > > In searching through the online docs, I noticed that attributes are not
> > > listed in the Methods section to browse for them.  Since an attribute is
> > > nothing more than setter/getter methods, I was expecting to find them in
> > > the list.
> > >
> > > I'm not 100% that this is RDoc,since I don't know exactly how the online
> > > docs are created, but I am under the impression that they use RDoc's
> > > implementation.  If I'm wrong, redirect my compass to where I need to
> > > address this.
> >
> > If methods are defined using attr_* then rdoc does not list them as methods.
> >
> > I agree that this is confusing (if not flat out wrong), but I've had
> > this discussion with various people and this view seems to be the minority.
> 
> I agree too! Yesterday i send an RDoc to my team partner (very new to
> ruby) and she notice this when comparing the UML with Rdoc.  This is
> very confusing !
> 

My take was based on the documentation of a method as follows from
Module.attr:

   module Mod
     attr  :size, true
   end

is equivalent to:

   module Mod
     def size
       @size
     end
     def size=(val)
       @size = val
     end
   end

So this implies that the attr* are in fact methods... 
but it sounds like this dead horse has been beaten in the past.

Who knows, maybe it'll finally get to me and I'll write my own document parser... 

Matt