Re: [Chicken-users] docstrings

[Anthony Carrico]

On 14 Aug 2002, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> re: docstrings:
>
> In an interactive programming environment of the smalltalk or lisp
> machine variety, they sort of made sense at one time, but a lot of
> what they do now could probably be done just as well with emacs and
> tags, couldn't it? Is it really useful to add that storage to compiled
> code when we mostly aren't doing interactive stuff anyway?

I agree. Docstrings don't seem appropriate for the compiler. I would
prefer to see Chicken end up as a lean mean compiler well supported by
optional external libraries (rather than seeing it turn into a monolith
like CommonLisp).

I don't mean that docstrings are generally bad. What I do mean is that a
language with tightly integrated reflexive features is a different beast
than (my understanding of) Chicken; a beast that has different design
requirements and goals. Putting docstrings into closures is definitely a
reflexive feature, think twice before heading down this road.

But let me a positive suggestion:

If you want docstrings, why not make them just another external library?
This could be a set of transformers that expands docstring-definitions
into normal definitions and spits out docstrings into an auxiliary file.
Syntax-case is your friend.

Why add anything to the compiler if it can be a library? Let's keep the
compiler simple! Anyway, that is my opinion, Felix's goals may differ.

  -Tony Carrico