Re: Ada and Doxygen

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Vadim Godunko <vgodunko@gmail.com> writes:

> We are known current GNAT's style for comments. Each package has a
> description at the specification and each entity also has a
> description below its declaration in the specification. GPS shows such
> a comment in tooltips.
>
> Qt's uses another way. There are no comments in headers at all. This
> makes header files clean - it is very important for overview of the
> class. 

You are implying that the comments get in the way of an "overview".

That makes sense; if you are mostly familiar with a package, but
forget the exact names, or want to see if a particular function is
there, it would be useful to have a short list of just the functions.

Emacs supports this by hiding selected parts of the file; all
comments, for example. See hs-minor-mode (hs for hide-show). That also
hides blocks in bodies, but apparently it doesn't currently understand
Ada for that feature. I don't like the current keybindings, but that's
easy to fix.

> All comments are placed in the implementation files. Special tool
> parse both headers and implementation files, construct list of
> classes, its methods/signals/slots/etc; then parse implementation
> files and extracts description for each entity; links
> classes/methods/ slots/signals with their descriptions and construct
> complete documentation in HTML form, which can be hosted somewhere
> or read by browser. After that, another tool pack this documentation
> and all related resources into the one "database" which can be
> registered in the Qt Assistant to extend useful of it (Qt Assistant
> allows to do full text search for example). And even it is not a
> last step, when you use Qt Creator (IDE for Qt) and stay somewhere
> in the code, you can click key and Qt Creator opens description of
> class/method you stay on in the Qt Assistant documentation. It is
> very fast and useful!

This could be done for the Ada code by a tool similar to AdaBrowse,
and an Emacs key binding could pop up Qt Assistant from Ada code. 

If I start using QtAda more, I'll be motivated to do this.

-- 
-- Stephe