From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
To: "Clément Pit-Claudel" <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Poor quality documentation in edebug.el, and recursive documentation.
Date: Wed, 6 May 2020 17:01:34 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200506170134.GB5741@ACM> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <6674ab3a-9107-d59f-5758-2fd5961cfbcc@gmail.com>
Hello, Clément.
On Tue, May 05, 2020 at 17:11:43 -0400, Clément Pit-Claudel wrote:
> As far as I know, there's no way to provide documentation for a slot
> of a cl-defstruct. This sounds like a reasonable feature request
> (you're looking at an auto-generated docstring).
> > I certainly care about what this function does, and the one liner is
> > gibberish. "Access slot "def-name" of ‘edebug--frame’ struct CL-X."
> Really? You're looking at the documentation of a field accessor — can
> it be made much better (sort of writing it by hand)?
It could be made much better. For a start, it shouldn't be
syntactically ambiguous - It could be talking about "an access slot" or
"accessing the slot". I think you're telling me that the second is
meant.
And why such a woolly, meaningless word like "access"? Are we talking
about a read access or a write access here? It's a bit like writing in
a doc string "_consider_ the input value" - vague and unhelpful, and
calculated to get people writing angry rants on emacs-devel..
Now people have explained it, I see that it means "return the value of
the slot def-name". That is explicit and says what is done. Why can
that not be written?
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. After all, in the doc string for
parse-partial-sexp, we don't just say it returns an 11-element list.
And why is the edebug--frame's metasyntactic variable called CL-X? If
somebody were trying deliberately to be unhelpful, that is what they
would call it.
> It's really the same as the following C function, assuming a struct
> called "backtrace" with a field called "def_name":
> def_name_t backtrace_def_name (backtrace) { return backtrace.def_name }
If the vagueness were fixed, so that that doc string was self-contained
and informative, I would be happy about it.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-05-06 17:01 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 [this message]
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
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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