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From: Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@d2-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ideas for Ada 200X
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 10:54:51 +0000 (UTC)
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Robert C. Leif <rleif@rleif.com> wrote:
: XML has formalized multiline comments.
: <annotation><documentation>....................</documentation></annotation>

No it hasn't, only the schema fans have aggreed on annotation
and documentation element types in Part 0 of the XSD. I think
annotations in a language are a good idea, but this form, IMO, renders
*non-tool-based* document type design, or document type study,
even less feasable by a human. Humans are much more important
when it comes to data descriptionthan omputing machines, 
aren't they? Domain specifics cannot easily be handled by (essentially)
numbers of bits... Luckily, there is RELAX NG.

: Therefore by analogy, one could create annotation and documentation types in
: Ada. These could be implemented as bounded strings. This would permit the
: compiler and tools like ASIS to have knowledge about the documentation.

How about a pragma like

   function foo(bar: String) return Natural;
   pragma Short_Description(foo, "the number of foos in bar");


georg