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library documentation package for lout?


From: DaviD W. Sanderson
Subject: library documentation package for lout?
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 1994 19:15:21 -0600

Has anyone done a package for lout that gives you output similar to Unix
man pages?

The project is this.  We have a fairly large library that we are going
to be documenting.  (About 800 functions, mostly Fortran.)  We want
to make the comment blocks in the source code look good, but also
susceptible to automated extraction and formatting into a typeset
reference manual.  The automation is important, since we want to
make it easy to keep the reference manual up to date.

So, I am looking for a markup language that we could use in the comment
blocks.  It should have very little 'visual clutter' since the comment
blocks will serve both as documentation in the source itself as well as
being used to generate the reference manual.  Lout strikes me as being a
good candidate for having little visual clutter and letting us arrange
the source in an attractive manner. ([nt]roff -man gives nice-looking
output, but the source cannot be free-form...)

An alternative approach would be to write something to parse our
standard comment template (appended in abbreviated form) and generate
document source that will format to approximately the same appearance,
but with appropriate fonts, etc.  However, since that would likely
involve inventing our own special markup indications to handle special
cases, we'd prefer to avoid that option if possible.

DaviD W. Sanderson                                    address@hidden
Space Science and Engineering Center    University of Wisconsin-Madison
"The Noah Webster of smileys"    - The Wall Street Journal, 15 Sep 1992

*$ Name:
*$      mcname - short description of purpose/use/etc
*$
*$ Interface:
*$      integer function
*$      mcname(integer param1, character*(*) param2)
*$
*$ Input:
*$      param1  - description of it
*$
*$ Output:
*$      param2  - description of it
*$
*$ Return values:
*$       0      - success
*$
*$ Remarks:
*$      Important use info, algorithm, etc.


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