Documentation Strings

It has been mentioned a few times already the importance of clearly documenting your files and library files. For the most part, you can use comments in your files; but in library files you use the DOC directive.

In addition to the commands listed in this chapter, you should also note DEFGROOVES).

For some real-life examples of how to document your library files, look at any of the library files supplied with this distribution.

Doc

A DOC command is pretty simple:

Doc This is a documentation string!

In most cases, DOCs are treated as COMMENTs. However, if the -Dx^22.1 option is given on the command line, DOCs are processed and printed to standard output.

For producing the MMA Standard Library Reference a trivial Python program is used to collate the output generated with a command like:

$ mma -Dx -w /usr/local/lib/mma/swing

Note, the '-w' option has been used to suppress the printing of warning messages.

Author

As part of the documentation package, there is a AUTHOR command:

Author Bob van der Poel

Currently AUTHOR lines are processed and the data is saved, but never used. It may be used in a future library documentation procedures, so you should use it in any library files you write.

Footnotes

...-Dx^22.1

See the command summary.