I found an easy way to set documentation for closures and procedures. I wrote this to guile-user earlier but send it to guile-devel as well as it may be of interest. On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 8:06 PM, Roland Orre wrote: > > There is no simple way to set procedure-documentation in guile. > For some years I've done it in the module's scheme description like > (set-procedure-property! proc 'documentation "help text") > > > but this is quite hard to maintain, and what seems to be the standard way (looking at libguile) SCM_DEFINE is too complicted and tedious. > I attach the code part as a file also, in case someone wants to use it. OK, I solved it like this, //I redefined the macros SCM_DEFINE and SCM_PROC //as SCM_DEFINED and SCM_PROCD #define SCM_DEFINED(FNAME, PRIMNAME, REQ, OPT, VAR, ARGLIST, DOCSTRING) \ SCM_SNARF_HERE(\ static const char s_ ## FNAME [] = PRIMNAME; \ SCM FNAME ARGLIST\ )\ SCM_SNARF_INIT(\ scm_procedure_documentation_x \ (scm_c_define_gsubr (s_ ## FNAME, REQ, OPT, VAR, \ (SCM_FUNC_CAST_ARBITRARY_ARGS) FNAME), \ scm_str2string(DOCSTRING))) //SCM_SNARF_DOCS(primitive, FNAME, PRIMNAME, ARGLIST, REQ, OPT, VAR, DOCSTRING) #define SCM_PROCD(RANAME, STR, REQ, OPT, VAR, CFN,DOCSTRING) \ SCM_SNARF_HERE(static const char RANAME[]=STR) \ SCM_SNARF_INIT(scm_procedure_documentation_x \ (scm_c_define_gsubr (RANAME, REQ, OPT, VAR, \ (SCM_FUNC_CAST_ARBITRARY_ARGS) CFN), \ scm_str2string(DOCSTRING)); \ ) // added a procedure procedure-documentation! static SCM scm_documentation; SCM_PROCD(s_procedure_documentation, "procedure-documentation!", 1,0,0, scm_procedure_documentation_x, "(procedure-documentaton! proc {doc})\n" "Returns or sets the doc string associated with @code{proc}."); SCM scm_procedure_documentation_x(SCM proc, SCM doc) { SCM code,orig; SCM_ASSERT (scm_is_true (scm_procedure_p (proc)), proc, SCM_ARG1, s_procedure_documentation); switch (SCM_TYP7 (proc)) { case scm_tcs_closures: code = SCM_CLOSURE_BODY (proc); if (scm_is_null (SCM_CDR (code))) return SCM_BOOL_F; orig = SCM_CAR (code); if (scm_is_string (orig)) { if (scm_is_string (doc)) { SCM_SETCAR(code,doc); return doc; } return orig; } else return SCM_BOOL_F; break; default: if (scm_is_string (doc)) { scm_set_procedure_property_x(proc,scm_documentation,doc); return doc; } else return scm_procedure_property(proc,scm_documentation); break; } return SCM_BOOL_F; } //and to the init procedure // scm_documentation=scm_from_locale_symbol("documentation"); // #include "yourmodule.x" This results in the following definition in the .x file scm_procedure_documentation_x (scm_c_define_gsubr (s_procedure_documentation, 1, 0, 0, (SCM (*)()) scm_procedure_documentation_x), scm_str2string("(procedure-documentaton! proc {doc}\n" "Returns or sets the doc string associated with @code{proc}.")); ; and of course similar for SCM_DEFINED, but I've defined most of my procedures with SCM_PROC anyway as the documentation hadn't been easy to get working. I also consider SCM_PROCD the cleaner solution, as I do not need to do one #define #undef for every procedure, and I can clearly see what arguments the procdure takes. I intended to generalise it to a a similar object-documentation! later with support for doc on file/database etc, but now I can finally get all my old C-routines documented without having the info in different files (the module init file).