Library standardization

[Bill Baxter]

e-t172 wrote:
> Walter Bright a écrit :
>> e-t172 wrote:
>>> - Like you said, indentation is stripped. This make .di files quite 
>>> ugly. Considering that .di files will often be directly read by the 
>>> user of the API, this is a problem.
>>
>> The .di files are meant for the compiler to read, not the user. 
>> They're supposed to strip out all the extra whitespace and comments. 
>> Think of them as "precompiled headers."
> 
> I agree with Bill Baxter: .di files should be more than that.

But now I understand that Walter wants .di files to be more like 
precompiled headers.   That's fine.  It opens up the possibility for 
doing things like byte-compiling them to speed up compilation (if that 
would make any difference).

The thing that I want them for is for plain text API documentation, and 
for that they're not so great, both because of the indentation and 
because the comments are stripped.

So now I think what would be best is:

1) for the compiler to generate ddoc output for everything that's public 
so that I can get some output even from modules which aren't using ddoc.

2) for there to be a set of to-plaintext ddoc macros (perhaps built in). 
  This is something I could work on, but I don't see the point if 1) is 
not dealt with first.


--bb