[Doxygen-develop] Support for other languages

[Vicki B. <vl...@cf...>]

I've been examining and comparing several "code documentation tools".
Having looked at several now, I really like Doxygen. In fact, I would
love to use Doxygen except for one show-stopper difficulty. The Company
where I am currently employed (where I would most likely deploy Doxygen)
uses Python.

But... Doxygen allows the use of input filters which convert snippets
of code (e.g., data structure declarations, method calls) from non-C++
languages into C++ syntax.  Doxygen is then able to create web pages,
diagrams, etc. This looked promising.

I found pydoxy and was quite pleased ... at first. Then I discovered
that the code listings in the resulting HTML pages _still look like
C++_.  This is not so promising.

While I can certainly understand why the filter creates "pseudo" C++
code out of the Python code, that isn't what the  ultimate web pages
should show to developers who want to browse that code. The developers
wrote Python; they want to browse Python.

The Doxygen Wish List lists "support for other languages" as a 10 in
difficulty. I would dearly love to see this item fulfilled.

However, I do not think that all languages should be equally difficult to
support. Languages that already have a filter (e.g. Python) _could_ be much
easier to support if the filter mechanism can be leveraged.

If the filters passed along both the translated code and the original
code, Doxygen could use the former for its analysis and the latter for
its code displays.  Ideally, this would involve an extension of the
current interface, so that existing filters would still work as they
do now.

How difficult would this be?
-- 
Vicki Brown     ZZZ                Journeyman Sourceror:
SF Bay Area, CA    zz  |\     _,,,---,,_      Scripts & Philtres
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