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From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
To: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
Cc: "Clément Pit-Claudel" <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Poor quality documentation in edebug.el, and recursive documentation.
Date: Wed, 06 May 2020 14:26:23 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <jwvy2q5q60w.fsf-monnier+emacs@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200506170134.GB5741@ACM> (Alan Mackenzie's message of "Wed, 6 May 2020 17:01:34 +0000")

> And like you say above, even that much is only a little bit helpful when
> the main thing needing documenting is the return value of the function
> call - what precisely a def-name is.

The function has no idea what that is.

> After all, in the doc string for parse-partial-sexp, we don't just say
> it returns an 11-element list.

That's a bad analogy: the 11-element list is completely constructed by
`parse-partial-sexp` so it knows very precisely what's in there.

In contrast Edebug's slot-accessor only knows that it returns the
content of that slot.  So it's more like `cl-third` or `nth` which can't
tell you much about their return value other than where it comes from.

This can be addressed by adding a `:documentation` to the slot in
`edebug.el`, tho.  But, for that you'll first need to find someone who
knows/understands that code.  Maybe you'll be the one best placed to add
that doc after you solve the problem that lead you to look at that
function ;-)


        Stefan




  parent reply	other threads:[~2020-05-06 18:26 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-05-05 20:20 Poor quality documentation in edebug.el, and recursive documentation Alan Mackenzie
2020-05-05 20:39 ` Drew Adams
2020-05-05 21:11 ` Clément Pit-Claudel
2020-05-06 17:01   ` Alan Mackenzie
2020-05-06 18:20     ` Stefan Monnier
2020-05-06 18:34       ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-05-08 19:59       ` Alan Mackenzie
2020-05-09  5:53         ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-05-09 13:47           ` Stefan Monnier
2020-05-09 13:53             ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-05-09 14:56           ` Alan Mackenzie
2020-05-09 15:06             ` tomas
2020-05-09 15:12               ` Andreas Schwab
2020-05-09 15:11             ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-05-06 18:26     ` Stefan Monnier [this message]
2020-05-05 22:18 ` Stefan Monnier
2020-05-08 19:53   ` Alan Mackenzie
2020-05-08 20:24     ` Stefan Monnier
2020-05-12  6:33       ` Madhu
2020-05-12  7:42         ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-05-12 14:04         ` cl-generic misdesign (was: Poor quality documentation in edebug.el, and recursive documentation) Stefan Monnier
2020-05-14  5:03           ` Richard Stallman

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