[fpc-pascal]fphelp, FPDoc, parsers...

[Sebastian Günther]

Hello all,

after reading all those postings regarding documentation, include files, 
online help etc. I have some remarks:

Scanner/Parser. FPDoc's pascal source file scanner and parser has been 
separated from FPDoc some time ago; they are not part of the FCL (see 
fcl/passrc) and can be used for other tools as well. For example, the 
XML-RPC wrapper generation tool uses the parser as well. And, using just 
the scanner, it should be easy to write a tool which replaces all 
$includes with the include files theirselves.

FPDoc. It was planned to store the source positions for all recognized 
elements anyway, and I even considered adding this information to the 
generated output, i.e. the HTML files will name the source file and line 
number of each element. I think I'll add this within the next few days.

fphelp: Nice idea, which I've already considered some time ago. I can 
write such a tool, as soon as I have the time for it (I guess about next 
week). It would consist of two parts: At first, it will create a search 
index, with informations about where to find a symbol and where the 
documentation is stored in the external XML files. The fphelp command 
will then use this information to parse the source file on-the-fly, so 
it can create the documentation page. Storing all pages offline wouldn't 
really make sense: In this case you could just use FPDoc as it is, to 
create a bunch of HTML files which you can browse (or easily convert to 
ASCII text, if necessary, using the usual tools). In all cases, it's 
time now to add fast index capabilities to FPDoc (the current version 
just uses flat indices, which are not really fast).


- Sebastian