RE: [boost] Re: Boost Documentation [was Iterator Adaptors]

From: Ronald Garcia (rgarcia4_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-03-12 14:32:25

>>>>> "jg" == Jeff Garland <jeff_at_[hidden]> writes:

    jg> Anyway, I don't care about the tool selection.  The point that
    jg> was lost was that no one should have to suffer the pain of
    jg> having to try and write C++ in XML and then extract code.  It
    jg> has to go the other way.

I agree that no one should have to write C++ in XML, meaning replacing
your "<" and ">" with "&lt;" and "&gt;" ,but if you can
embed C++ within otherwise XML, a lot of interesting options arise in
addition to multiple documentation formats,
such as the ability to extract and compile your code examples in order
to verify their correctness.  This ability does open up the option of
literate programming in XML, but hardly makes it a requirement (In my
experimentation, lp may add a lot of extra burden to the code development
process if you don't have good support tools).

XML shows promise in that it handles issues of parsing structure while
allowing the output to be formatted in many ways (HTML, latex, etc).
The problem wrt C++ is that it doesn't play well with c++ code that
contains angle brackets, etc.  Of course, this could be easily
surmounted with a small transformation on XML syntax as Jeremy
suggested, followed by a run through an XML toolset.