Re: cleanups with long-term benefits (was Re: [PATCH] schemas: Add vim modeline)

[John Snow]

On 8/3/20 8:01 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> That said, after a bit more research I'm skeptical about the possibility
> of using an off-the-shelf parser because most of them either don't
> support comments, or are based on YAJL which simply discards comments.

Heresy:

Docstrings could become part of the data format so they can be parsed, 
analyzed and validated. Parsers largely treat comments like non-semantic 
information and discard it. Round-trip parsers that preserve comments in 
any language are extremely rare.

If the docstrings are relevant to the generator and aren't discardable, 
they should be fully-fledged data members.

In a prototype I had for a YAML format, I just promoted docstrings 
directly to fields, so I could allow clients to query help text for 
individual commands.

--js