Re: "Documentation by paper"

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at wasabisystems dot com>]

Daniel Berlin <dberlin@dberlin.org> writes:

> > Dunno about anyone else, but I am all for this.
> >
> 
> Is there anyone *except* Richard Kenner who is against this?

I've never found this sort of documentation to be useful.  If I want
to find out what a function does, I go look at it in the source code.
M-. is easy to type in Emacs.  If I wanted anything more, I would use
Source Navigator, but I don't.

An organized reference to gcc implementation internals would be very
useful.  But that's not what we get from documentation extracted from
the source code.  What we get is a disorganized set of reference
information.  It tells you the information that's easy to find out in
various other ways, but it doesn't tell you what you really need to
know, which is the implicit assumptions and the underlying ideas.

Also, I find source annotations to be slightly irritating in practice.

I don't feel terribly strongly about this.  But overall I would find
it to be a minor hindrance and no help.

Ian