Re: wishlist: implicit anchor for @deffn etc

[Per Bothner]

On 11/02/2017 11:58 AM, Gavin Smith wrote:
> The final point is whether anyone would use this feature. You said it
> already exists in Sphinx; is it used a lot in manuals written in Sphinx?
> If so, that would be a good argument for adding the feature to Texinfo.

I don't know how much this feature is used in Sphinx.  However,
the Racket documentation uses links to definitions very extensively,
in both example and running text.  There are many examples here:

   https://docs.racket-lang.org/quick/index.html

Basically anything in blue is the functional equivalent of a @dref.

I believe the documentation source format is Scribble, but I don't
know how links are written in the Scribble source.  My impression is
that it is rather "magic": You mark some code as Racket source code,
and then a plugin searches for definitions of variables in the source code.
That level of magic is not suitable for texinfo, but letting people
annotate some identifiers with @dref seems reasonable.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/