Re: [Caml-list] automatic extaction of the .mli (and a little more) from the .ml

[Alain Frisch <alain@frisch.fr>]

I've created a proof-of-concept implementation of such a tool as part of 
the "extension_points" branch, which introduces a syntax for attributes 
on various syntactic items (including type declarations and value bindings).

Note that I *don't* endorse the idea of generating .mli files 
automatically :-)


Here is the code:

http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/extension_points/experimental/frisch/nomli.ml?revision=HEAD&view=markup

and an example:

http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/extension_points/experimental/frisch/test_nomli.ml?revision=HEAD&view=markup


On 05/31/2013 05:43 AM, Francois Berenger wrote:
> - I think there should be tags in the .ml file as comments
>    that say "export this" to the .mli.

Encoding annotations in comments is very fragile, because they are not 
kept by the parser in the generated Parsetree, and it is not 
well-defined to which component each component refers to.  ocamldoc uses 
comments, and as a consequence, it does not combine well with 
preprocessors (Camlp4/Camlp5/Fan/ppx extensions cannot generate 
documentation fragments, and it is likely that they break existing 
ones).  A version of ocamldoc based on attributes of the 
extension_points branch would be much more robust (and simple).  I've 
written another toy POC implementation of a mini-ocamldoc based on 
attributes:

http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/extension_points/experimental/frisch/minidoc.ml?revision=HEAD&view=markup

http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/ocaml/branches/extension_points/experimental/frisch/testdoc.mli?revision=HEAD&view=markup


(experimental/frisch/Makefile in the extenstion_point branch contains 
everything to compile and run these little demos.)

-- Alain