This package contains a tool to generate the documentation for a Curry program (i.e., the main module and all its imported modules) in HTML (or LaTeX) format. The generated HTML pages contain information about all data types and functions exported by a module as well as links between the different entities. Furthermore, some information about the definitional status of functions (like rigid, flexible, external, complete, or overlapping definitions) are provided and combined with documentation comments provided by the programmer.
A documentation comment starts at the beginning of a
line with three dashes (also in literate programs!). All documentation
comments immediately before a definition of a datatype or (top-level)
function are kept together. The documentation comments for the complete
module occur before the first module or import
line in the module. The comments can also contain several special tags.
These tags must be the first thing on its line (in the documentation
comment) and continues until the next tag is encountered or until the
end of the comment. The following tags are recognized:
@author commentSpecifies the author of a module (only reasonable in module comments).
@version commentSpecifies the version of a module (only reasonable in module comments).
@cons id commentA comment for the constructor id of a datatype (only
reasonable in datatype comments).
@param id commentA comment for function parameter id (only reasonable in
function comments). Due to pattern matching, this need not be the name
of a parameter given in the declaration of the function but all
parameters for this functions must be commented in left-to-right
order.
@return commentA comment for the return value of a function (only reasonable in function comments).
The comment of a documented entity can be any string in Markdown syntax. The
currently supported set of elements is described in Curry
package markdown. The comments can also contain markups in HTML
format so that special characters like < must be quoted.
In addition to Markdown or HTML markups, one can also mark
references to names of operations or data types in
Curry programs. These are translated into links inside the generated
HTML documentation (if they are unqualified) or into links in other
module documentations if they are qualified with a module name. Such
references have to be enclosed in single quotes.
The following example shows a Curry program with some documentation comments:
--- This is an
--- example module.
--- @author Michael Hanus
--- @version 0.1
module Example where
--- The function `conc` concatenates two lists.
--- It is also predefined as 'Prelude.++'.
--- @param xs - the first list
--- @param ys - the second list
--- @return a list containing all elements of `xs` and `ys`
conc [] ys = ys
conc (x:xs) ys = x : conc xs ys
-- this comment will not be included in the documentation
--- The function `last` computes the last element of a given list.
--- It is based on the operation 'conc' to concatenate two lists.
--- @param xs - the given input list
--- @return last element of the input list
last xs | conc ys [x] =:= xs = x where x,ys free
--- This data type defines _polymorphic_ trees.
--- @cons Leaf - a leaf of the tree
--- @cons Node - an inner node of the tree
data Tree a = Leaf a | Node [Tree a]If this program is contained in the file Example.curry,
one can generate the documentation by executing the command
currydoc ExampleThis command creates the directory DOC_Example (if it
does not exist) and puts all HTML documentation files for the main
program module Example and all its imported modules in this
directory together with a main index file index.html. If
one prefers another directory for the documentation files, one can also
execute the command
currydoc docdir Examplewhere docdir is the directory for the documentation
files.
More details on CurryDoc are described in the user manuals of the Curry systems PAKCS and KiCS2. There is also a paper describing the basic ideas of CurryDoc:
M. Hanus: CurryDoc : A Documentation Tool for Declarative Programs. Proc. of the 11th International Workshop on Functional and (Constraint) Logic Programming (WFLP 2002), Research Report UDMI/18/2002/RR, Università degli Studi di Udine, pp. 225-228, 2002