No header files?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:31:02 -0400, AJ <aj at nospam.net> wrote:

>
> "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:op.u15929x0eav7ka at localhost.localdomain...
>
>> What happens (and being a  long-time C++ developer, I've had my fair  
>> share
>> of experience with it) is  that the interface gets out of sync with the
>> implementation, so weird shit  happens.
>>
>> I even think d's "editable" interface files are suspect.  They can be  
>> out
>> of sync with the object files, and then you have the same problem.  The
>> best model by far is Java and C# where the object files *are* the
>> interface files.  Then you only have to worry about documentation being
>> out of sync.  But at least your programs don't crash randomly for no
>> reason because the docs are invalid.
>>
>> What I would suggest is creating stub functions via {} and then when you
>> go back to fill in the interface, fill in the {} area.  You get the same
>> effect.
>
> You lose the ability to use, say a class declaration, as the  
> specification
> (at least without a sophisitcated, code-folding/code-formatting IDE).

What do you use, Notepad?  Even vi does this now.

In any case, I seldom refer to the source file when I can just look at the  
docs generated from the comments.  If you aren't commenting your API, then  
I'm not using your lib, so don't even suggest that header files *without  
comments* are better than auto-generated docs.  Header files with comments  
are trivially transformed into auto-generated docs (one-liner).

-Steve