Troels Henriksen wrote:
Robert Strandh strandh@labri.fr writes:
* Insert docstrings for all exported functionality. If I recall correctly, Robert Strandh spoke with one of the original CLIM spec authors and was told not to worry about copyright issues, so we could just copy from there.I am starting to think that docstrings are evil (because they are mostly noise to the person reading the code). I would like to discuss the possibility of using (SETF DOCUMENTATION) instead.
I think they are just as useful as comments to the person reading the code. I'm not a fan of (SETF DOCUMENTATION), as it separates the documentation from the code, making it easier for the two to get out of sync.
I'd suggest that having docstrings in defgenerics is benign, because they don't push meaningful code off the screen (assuming one doesn't use :method). That would tend to confine the objections to documentation strings to ones that attach to method definitions and function definitions. In that case, one could put a (setf documentation) right after the definition in question, so that they wouldn't float away from the code, but wouldn't push the lambda list away from the body of the definition. I assume that, the way they are placed, below the slot definitions, documentation strings for defclass are benign.
Would that be a reasonable compromise?