From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2010-04-15T06:32:16+09:00
Subject: Re: OT(?): Adapting rdoc to produce documentation for something other  than ruby or c--advisable?

On Apr 14, 2010, at 09:00, rpardee@gmail.com wrote:
> In my day job I'm a sas (www.sas.com) programmer.  I've got a plain
> text file of sas macros (roughly equivalent to ruby's methods) for
> which I would love to have rdoc-style documentation.  Specifically,
> I'd like a list of the macros, the params they take, the explanatory
> comments that precede each one & the expandable code listing when you
> click a method name.
> 
> A brief troll through the RDoc::Markup docs makes me wonder if I
> couldn't learn to drive that sufficiently to get rdoc to do this for
> me.
> 
> Can anybody give me a sense for how badly RDoc & I would have to
> torture one another to get this to work?
> 
> In case it's helpful, sas has c-style comments: '*' starts a comment
> until the first following ';' char.  Macro definitions are preceded by
> the keyword %macro, followed by a name & an optional parenthesized,
> comma-delimited list of paraameters.  All lines up to the first
> following %mend keyword are the body of the macro.

If you've got input files that aren't already handled (ruby, C, text, perl are handled built-in, fortan is available via an extension) you'll want to look at writing a parser.

RDoc::Parser::C is a pile of regular expressions (which would probably work best to start), or if you can find (or write) a real parser for SAS macros you can use that instead.

An RDoc::Parser will turn an input document (like your SAS file) into a tree of code built around an RDoc::TopLevel (a file) and it's various descendents (lib/rdoc/code_objects.rb has the list).  You'll need to decide on a mapping from the elements of SAS macros to classes, modules, and methods.