Re: doc strings

[Paul Kienzle]

John W. Eaton wrote:

> It seems to me that doing something similar would be useful for
> Octave.  Mostly it would make it easier to write the doc strings, but
> it would also make the binary a little bit smaller if the doc strings
> were stored in separate files.  We could have mkoctfile do something
> useful like strip the comments out and put them in a corresponding
> .hlp file (or similar).  I think Matlab puts the doc strings for
> built-in functions in .m files, but we'd need to be careful about
> having mkoctfile do that (it would need to avoid writing over the .m
> file of the same name that you are working on converting to C++).
>
> Comments?
I've often considered suggesting something like that.  One
motivation is to separate the documentation from the
function so that interested parties can provide docs in their
own language.

However, there's nothing stopping that from happening
now other than a few lines of code in help.cc to first
search for help in a locale dependent path and interested parties.
And putting in the escapes is not that difficult.

So either way is fine for me, with the caveat that I hate
forcing an upgrade to the latest version of octave to use
octave-forge, and this would be another of those
"need at least octave 2.1.xxx" changes.  I've started
noting the required octave version on the download
page, and so long as I keep the older releases around I
suppose that isn't that big a problem either.

Paul Kienzle
address@hidden