On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:15:00 -0800, John Meacham
I was thinking it would be useful if parts of haddock could be made into a library. mainly the parsing bits of it. There are a lot of useful little documentation aware utilities that can be written, and the haddock command itself can be simplified.
There are several haskell documentation tools out there and it would be advantagous if they could use the same in-code syntax but just have different back ends.
other things someone might want to do with the haddock parser, but fall outside the haddock tools scope:
- A version which knows how to get type signatures from ghc even if they are not in the source. - A command line utility which searches an optimized index built from the haskell modules and their haddock annotations. - Various other web presentations of the data. there is a lot of room for experimentation. - A graphical browser which generates graphs of code dependence and lets you look at the documentation for any function. - integration with a haskell debugger.
I've modified Haddock so it can dump the interfaces it has parsed (I simple made Interface an instance of Binary with some TH code). The Interface contains the parsed Haskell code plus documentation and this serves me well since I only intend to create tools like a graphical browser, :doc in GHCi and @doc in lambdabot. I've had some setbacks while hacking on the browser (named wxHaddock in lack better) and the lambdabot module but I'll probably finish both when I get some more time on my hands. -- Friendly, Lemmih