__traits(documentation, X)

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 1/18/18 4:01 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 January 2018 at 20:35:54 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> In any case, I stand by my assertion -- comments should be comments, 
>> not code.
> 
> Note that we aren't talking about comments. We're talking about ddoc 
> strings. They just have very similar appearance to comments, but they 
> are distinct entities defined by D to be part of the AST (and the 
> compiler will parse their contents too if you ask it to!), unlike 
> regular comments which are discarded before parsing.

Hm... I don't see where Ddoc comments are defined separately from 
comments in the grammar. How they are stored internally is up to the 
compiler, and as far as I know, the D *language* makes no guarantees on 
what comes out:

"The specification for the form of embedded documentation comments only 
specifies how information is to be presented to the compiler. It is 
implementation-defined how that information is used and the form of the 
final presentation."

This brings up another thing: What if the compiler you are using decides 
to do something completely different with the documentation (or maybe 
even nothing)? Then __traits(documentation, X) may be completely 
different and cause different code to be generated.

-Steve