Documentation Question

Documentation Question

[Andrew Trevors]

Sorry to post a non-development question here but I figured that this mailing list would have the answers I need.  I am a graduate
student at a university in Ontario, Canada.  I am taking part in the teaching of a course on Software Architecture.  We will be
using GNU Emacs as a guinea pig this coming semester (we've used Linux, Vim, Apache, Mozilla, Nautilus, PostgreSQL, mySQL, and a
wealth of other open source software).  The idea is to study the architecture (high level components, e.g. subsystems, and their
interactions) of a real system by first formulating a conceptual architecture (the as-designed view as the developers see it) and
then extracting a concrete architecture (the as-implemented view) and then comparing them, and suggesting ways to repair the
architecture (the two should be the same, but they are often not).

Now, why I've posted this here is that I haven't had much luck finding any design type documentation that could be used to formulate
a conceptual architecture.  Is there any sort of docs or anything that is used to teach new programmers to the project, or is this
type of thing usually up to the programmer himself by reading through code/comments.

Thanks for any help you can give me.  If I have offended or annoyed anybody by posting here, I apoligize and I'm sorry.

Andrew

Andrew Trevors BCS (UNB) MMath I
Graduate Student, Software Architecture Group
School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo

Re: Documentation Question

[Alex Schroeder]

"Andrew Trevors" <adtrevors@plg2.math.uwaterloo.ca> writes:

> Now, why I've posted this here is that I haven't had much luck finding
> any design type documentation that could be used to formulate a
> conceptual architecture.  Is there any sort of docs or anything that
> is used to teach new programmers to the project, or is this type of
> thing usually up to the programmer himself by reading through
> code/comments.

For people joining the project, the source is the documentation,
specially for such tricky things as the redisplay engine.

Emacs basically implements a lisp interpreter in C, some editing
primitives in C, and the rest in lisp.  So you need to decide now
wether to focus on Emacs-as-Lisp-engine or
Emacs-as-developing-environment.

For C authors, the source is the documentation.  For Elisp authors,
Emacs provides an integrated help facility, and manuals.  Some of
these document technical things such as the command loop, but very
often Elisp authors do not need this kind of in-depth information.

A paper by RMS describing one of the earliest Emacs implementations,
and some of the design concepts still used:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html

Alex.

Re: Documentation Question

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

"Andrew Trevors" <adtrevors@plg2.math.uwaterloo.ca> writes:

   We will be using GNU Emacs as a guinea
   pig this coming semester

cool.  check out:

  http://www.finseth.com/~fin/craft/

thi