Question on Lisp documentation tools / sym doc

You might get Michael Genesereth to comment on that
"tradition".  I think he (only he) suggested that
it was best not to document code.  It only encouraged
people to change it.

In 1967 or so when the project started, it was
not possible to keep all the compiled code on-line
at the same time. The system build had to be done
from tapes. When you have no space, you might even
think that comments in the source code are bad.

Note that on the PDP-10 the storage of symbols
penalized names of more than six characters. They took
extra words.  FOO, BAR and even FOOBAR  took the
same space. but FOOBAR1  took an extra 36-bit word.


RJF


Martin RUBEY wrote:
> I found the following interesting comment in
> nparse.lisp:
> 
> ;;I know that the tradition says there should be no comments
> ;;in tricky code in maxima.  However the operator parsing
> ;;gave me a bit of trouble.   It was incorrect because
> ;;it could not handle things produced by the extensions
> ;;the following was broken for prefixes
> 
> 
> :-)
> 
> maybe though (s)he meant that there should only be docstrings...
> 
> I like the idea of docstrings VERY much! I think it is VERY well suited to 
> maxima and also I think it's a lot less work than the axiom approach. 
> (they need something different, too...)
> 
> Concerning the sym package: I finally got into touch with Annick 
> Valibouze, its main author. It seems that we will finally get a TeX-source 
> of the english documentation! (up to now there is only a dvi file)
> 
> Martin
> 
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