next up previous contents
Next: Details Up: Proposed Changes for CXX2HTML Previous: Summary of changes

Justification

We believe the case for changing the formatting is self-evident. Please look at the Table.h, TableVector.h, and Array.h examples on Wes Young's home page (http://tarzan.aoc.nrao.edu/~wyoung/). In summary the improvements are

  1. Return types and arguments are more easily identified.
  2. Function descriptions are bound more tightly to the functions they describe.
  3. Grouped information is easier to identify.

We propose to split the summary listings from the descriptive text and split the descriptive text for each class into separate files. This allows us to produce summary only hardcopy and selective class hardcopy. The current output of cxx2html precludes these options.
We recognize that the documentation system will be used by both code maintainers and developers as well as applications programmers (library users). Each type of programmer has different needs in documentation; maintainers and developers often need access to all information about a class while the application write really only cares about the public and sometimes protected interface of a class. Implementing a user specified switch to display the private information should satisfy both classes of programmers.



tcornwel@nrao.edu