Re: Writing 'help' functions as m-files

[John W. Eaton]

On 27-Mar-2008, John W. Eaton wrote:

| On 27-Mar-2008, David Bateman wrote:
| 
| | This imposes a lot of work adapting the existing code and might make
| | oct-files that aren't part of Octave incompatible, so even if this
| | change is made we should support the old way of doing it as well.
| 
| Yes, we would still handle doc strings defined as they are now.  But
| allowing them to be written as comments would be nice.  For doc
| strings defined this way in .oct files we would need a way to generate files
| files, we would need a way to gene

Sorry, I sent this before I finished editing it.  I mean to say

For strings defined this way in .oct files we would need a way to
generate files files, we would need a way to generate external doc
files.  Probably the simplest thing would be to generate .m files with
the same base name, or perhaps to use a new extension for files that
contain doc strings.  I supposed we could modify the mkoctfile script
to do the job.

But yes, you are right that this is a fair amount of work.  Is it
worth it to avoid having to deal with the escape sequences when
writing doc strings in C++ files?

As for the size savings, the doc strings currently add a total of
approximately 337kb of text to the Octave executable and core .oct
files (this number comes from looking at the size of the generated
src/DOCSTRINGS file that is used for creating the Octave manual .texi
files).  All together, the Octave libraries and .oct files are
approximately 25MB on my system (and that's the stripped size).
Someone will have to put a lot more detail into the doc strings before
the data size savings would really be significant.

jwe