Question on Lisp documentation tools



C Y <smustudent1@yahoo.com> writes:

> --- Jesper Harder <harder@ifa.au.dk> wrote:
>> C Y <smustudent1@yahoo.com> writes:
>>
>> >> Do you know the Mathematica manual?  It has an appendix with a
>> >> listing of all built-in Mathematica objects with a short
>> >> explanation of each item.  That could be a different way of using 
>> >> docstrings.
>> >
>> > Um.  How is that different from what we've been discussing?
>> 
>> I think it's different because the appendix in the Mathematica manual
>> is just an alphabetical list¹ with a short description -- it's not
>> the main reference where a function is explained in detail.
>
> Which do you think would be better?  Alphabetical or categorical?

Both :-) 

Seriously, I don't know -- my main point was just that you should be
aware of doscstrings, if you're thinking about putting documentation in
the source.

But short term I think the user manual is much more important than the
reference manual.  

Another thing to consider is Mike Clarkson's version of the manual.
It's probably not worth putting a lot of work in the current reference
if maybe we're going to use Mike's version.