Re: lost argument and doc string

[Andreas Schwab]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

|> On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Tak Ota wrote:
|> 
|> > I did the same experiment, running make-docfile manually on simple.el,
|> > and got surprised.  And the source file is requesting the sequence
|> > `dquote bslash newline' as the beginning of the valid doc string in
|> > case of el files.  I don't think this is right.  Starting doc string
|> > that way is only optional I believe.
|> 
|> Please make sure that any changes you make in this don't break 
|> loaddefs.el.  I believe loaddefs is the reason for that requirement of 
|> how the doc string should begin (since loaddefs is generated by a 
|> program, there's no problem satisfying that requirement in that case).  I 
|> imagine that there was some reason to require such a format, in which 
|> case we should avoid breaking that.
|> 
|> Richard, do you recall why this format was required?

I'd guess it's just so that you don't need a full Lisp parser in
make-docfile.  Especially for defvar there can be an arbitrary lisp
expression before the doc string, which you would have to skip
carefully.  With the current format you can just skip to end of line and
identify the doc string immediately.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, address@hidden
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