At 11:19 AM 7/5/00 -0400, Ivan Tomek wrote:
>'Standard' is probably too strong a word. 'Guidelines' or 
>'Recommended form/practice' might be better. And I don't think that it 
>is impossible to have an informal agreement. 
>
>I would see this as a desirable development. Consider method 
>comments, for example. They can be automatically extracted for 
>documentation or queries and if they all had similar format and 
>content, you could rely on them to provide complete, meaningful and 
>useful easy-to-read information.

It is difficult to consistently follow a format by hand so one can do the
above.  

As an alternative, using my protocol objects, one could store ANSI standard
draft format descriptions, parameter and return value definitions and types,
and error sections.  This would allow regular old Smalltalk code for
fetching, storing, changing, filing the stuff just like we do now for method
comment, category, etc.

All the support is there in my protocol objects, but I haven't gotten around
to modifying the Class hierarchy browser to adding it.  I'm not confident I
will get to it anytime soon.




> By the way, if the Smalltalk 
>community agreed on a standard XML format for source code, and if 
>this included method comments, they could be extracted even more 
>easily.

If they just used the already ANSI standard SIF, it would be easier still.
I also think it would then be easy to translate to XML from SIF, rather that
from dialect specific stuff.

--
Richard A. Harmon          "The only good zombie is a dead zombie"
harmonra at webname.com           E. G. McCarthy
Spencer, Iowa