Hi Rooters -
many of us have been exercising with THtml and other automatic
code generation tools for quite a while already and it seems that we've
accumulated enough experience to summarize which functionality we need from
these tools and what we are missing. I looked over the references to other
code generation tools mentioned in the discussion above
http://starship.python.net/crew/tbryan/PERCEPS/index.html
http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/index.html
- none of them is perfect and have all the needed features. So I started
writing down a list of features I'd like an automatic code generation tool
for C++ to provide. My starting point is that most of the features provided
by THtml are useful and should be retained so I'm mostly listing the features
I'm missing in THtml and emphasizing those which are missing in other tools.
I realize that in some cases my dreams can go too far so do not take "should"
in the list below as a must, it is much more a wish... Alas,
- it should be possible to have a source code of one C++ class residing in
several source files
- generation of the documentaion should not require instrumenting the sources
with some metasymbols (which I believe are required by doxygen)
- it should be easy to tell the code generation tool to search for the
header/source files in a given directory and also in its subdirectories
w/o specifying each of the subdirectories explicitly
- it also should be possible to generate HTML docs for a single class
(THtml does it)
- HTML docs should have links to the original source files so it would be
possible to browse the original headers/sources directly
- I didn't find if PERCEPS does it
- doxygen doesn't do it
- it is very convenient (also useful) to have brief comments in the header
files. It would be very nice to have these comments propagated into HTML
docs.
- It also makes sense to have more detailed descriptions of the (non-inlined)
member functions in the source files. There should be links connecting the
brief descriptions and the detailed ones.
- the HTML docs should be searchable, for example it should be possible to
ask to display all the references to a given variable -
LXR (see http://lxr.linux.no/) provides such a functiionality, it is less
convenient for other purposes though)
- finally I personally didn't find much use of the .ps files with inheritance
trees generated by THtml, ROOT sometimes crashes when generating .ps file
for a class (problem reported to root-bugs)
-best, pasha
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