XML comments

[alex...@mail.ru]

Is there a format for documentation comments (like /// in C#)? This
seems pretty important if we want Nemerle libraries to be usable from
other languages. I couldn't find any such comments in Nemerle sources.

[Kamil Skalski]

As stated in thread
http://groups.google.com/group/nemerle-en/browse_thread/thread/3194b4b4d96c1c72
we had some ideas for the simplified format of documentation comments.
Its main point was to allow the same XML tags as C# documentation
system (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/csref/html/vcoriXMLDocumentation.asp),
but for some special constructs compiler should automatically expand
them to XML tags. As an example (AFAIR) let's take following comment

/**
This method sends notification to client and change state to 'sent'

The message's contents are taken from [msg] parameter and...
*/

would be equivalent to C#'s
/**
<summary>This method sends notification to client and change state
to 'sent'</summary>
<remarks>
The message's contents are taken from <code>msg</code> parameter and...
</remarks>
*/

But this special syntax specification was never finished (thus we are
still open for changing it and making it standardised) - some partial
implementation of rules exists, but should probably be extended,
tested and fixed.

Maybe this is a good time and place to discuss and gather the
specification and later we/somebody could implement missing features.

Take a look at http://nemerle.org/svn/nemerle/trunk/lib/list.n

--
Kamil Skalski
http://nazgul.omega.pl