Re: generating a manual from annotations in source code

[karlheg@inetarena.com (Karl M. Hegbloom)]

>>>>> "Gary" == Gary V Vaughan <gvaughan@oranda.demon.co.uk> writes:

    Gary> [1 <text/plain; us-ascii (7bit)>] Clark McGrew wrote:
    >> I would like to see a documentation property attached to both
    >> scheme and primitive functions (and compiled into the
    >> executable).  I find it very useful when I'm hacking around to
    >> be able to get a quick synopsis of a function.  But, if the
    >> documentation is compiled into the exe, then the doc strings
    >> should be short.

    Gary> I would tend to think this adds unnecessary bload to the
    Gary> binary, and would mean that the doc strings for subr's
    Gary> (implemented in C) and (in the future) byte-compiled scheme
    Gary> functions would be stored (and thus accessed, wrt lookup
    Gary> code) differently.

    Gary> I like the way emacs stores its doc strings in an indexed
    Gary> file generated at (byte) compile time -- despite the
    Gary> reservations some of you guys have...
 
 Isn't there a way to have the C compiler put those strings in a
 specific ELF section, one that's not ever paged in unless something
 in it is referenced?  I think there's a directive for `gcc' that can
 do that... is this the sort of thing it's for?

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