__traits(documentation, X)

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 1/18/18 11:48 AM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 January 2018 at 16:41:04 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> Furthermore, I'd ask, if it's possible today, why do we need a 
>> __traits to do it?
> 
> It is an enormous pain to do it now.... well, sort of, actually, the way 
> I'd do it now is do a two-step makefile, where step 1 runs a ddoc 
> generator and step 2 import("generated.html") it.

This is how I'd imagine doing something like this. I don't see it being 
a huge pain, just an extra build step.

> But, for stuff like little command line arg stuff, or web interface 
> creation, it is nice to be able to print that data more conveniently. 
> Any code that uses it in an evil way should be stupid, but 
> writeln(__traits(documentation, foo)) is useful and not really harmless.
> 

Did you mean not really harmful?

But in any case, the idea that comments affect the file you are 
compiling *right now*, and not some other tool-generated file makes me 
very nervous. Comments are supposed to not affect the code. Consider 
that with this feature, the documentation now becomes part of the API.

-Steve