Babel vs. Doxygen?

Babel vs. Doxygen?

[Michael Hannon]

Greetings.  I just ran across an article about Doxygen [1], and I'm trying to
understand if there's any intersection between Doxygen/Roxygen and Org mode
Babel, both of which seem to have literate programming as a goal.  Any
thoughts about this?  Thanks.

-- Mike

Re: Babel vs. Doxygen?

[Sebastien Vauban]

Hi Michael,

Michael Hannon wrote:
> Greetings.  I just ran across an article about Doxygen [1], and I'm trying to

Forgotten footnote?

> understand if there's any intersection between Doxygen/Roxygen and Org mode
> Babel, both of which seem to have literate programming as a goal.  Any
> thoughts about this?  Thanks.

It just is completely different: with Babel, you put code blocks inside
documentation to be read by a human.

With Doxygen and the like, you put special comments (for generating doc)
inside your code. That's the opposite!

You could view it as more or less equal, but it's not. LP allows you to make a
documentation, and spread code blocks in any order inside it, in the order
which make more sense for the user to understand your strategy, method, etc.

LP allows you also to write a block of code once, and reuse it (even with
parameters) in multiple places, avoiding copy/pasted code for languages where
such a thing is sometimes difficult to avoid (SQL, Makefile, etc.), or where
avoiding it would make the code even much more complex.

These two last arguments are simply not applicable for Doxygen.

Best regards,
  Seb

-- 
Sebastien Vauban

Re: Babel vs. Doxygen?

[Michael Hannon]

On Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 1:04 AM Sebastien Vauban wrote:

> Michael Hannon wrote:
>> Greetings.  I just ran across an article about Doxygen [1], and I'm
>> trying to
>
> Forgotten footnote?

Hi, Seb.  Yep, the footnote appears in my draft message but not in the final
message.  Don't know what happened.  I'm sure this isn't a mystery to anybody,
but here's the reference:

    [1] http://www.doxygen.org/

>> understand if there's any intersection between Doxygen/Roxygen and Org mode
>> Babel, both of which seem to have literate programming as a goal.  Any
>> thoughts about this?  Thanks.
>
> It just is completely different: with Babel, you put code blocks inside
> documentation to be read by a human.
>
> With Doxygen and the like, you put special comments (for generating doc)
> inside your code. That's the opposite!
>
> You could view it as more or less equal, but it's not. LP allows you to make
> a documentation, and spread code blocks in any order inside it, in the order
> which make more sense for the user to understand your strategy, method, etc.
>
> LP allows you also to write a block of code once, and reuse it (even with
> parameters) in multiple places, avoiding copy/pasted code for languages
> where such a thing is sometimes difficult to avoid (SQL, Makefile, etc.), or
> where avoiding it would make the code even much more complex.
>
> These two last arguments are simply not applicable for Doxygen.

Thanks, this all makes good sense to me.  I guess I was basically wondering if
people were routinely using some combination of Doxygen and Org mode -- maybe
including Doxygen markup inside the Org file, then running doxygen on the
tangled output or ...  This is evidently not a common/useful way of working.

-- Mike

Re: Babel vs. Doxygen?

[Eric Schulte]

Michael Hannon <jm_hannon@yahoo.com> writes:

> Greetings.  I just ran across an article about Doxygen [1], and I'm trying to
> understand if there's any intersection between Doxygen/Roxygen and Org mode
> Babel, both of which seem to have literate programming as a goal.  Any
> thoughts about this?  Thanks.
>
> -- Mike
>

Inline API documentation tools can be thought of as a very simple form
of literate programming.  These tools are addressed in the paper on code
block behavior in Org-mode.  See http://www.jstatsoft.org/v46/i03

Best,

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/