Re: [Swig-devel] GSoC "Doxygen Translator" Progress

[William S F. <ws...@fu...>]

Olly Betts wrote:
> On 2008-07-23, William S Fulton <ws...@fu...> wrote:
>> Would there be a need for a new doxygen feature, something like:
>>
>> %feature("doxygen") Foo::bar(int n) "/** /param n number /return result */"
>>
>> Which would attach itself to the appropriate Foo::bar symbol? I think 
>> doxygen has a way to attach comments to a symbol anyway, so probably we 
>> should be using that instead instead of the above %feature.
> 
> Doxygen can do that, but there are various reasons why you might want to
> override a C/C++ documentation comment for another language (e.g. it
> might give some example code, or talk about something C/C++-specific or
> link to an external document which isn't useful), so it's probably
> useful to provide features to allow replacing a comment entirely, and
> perhaps also to append to a comment.
> 
That's a good point.

>> You've written a doxygen parser which makes the doxygen comments 
>> available in a parse tree. That makes perfect sense for providing a 
>> generic way to process the comments by each target language. Is this 
>> parser all written from scratch or have you been able to utilise the 
>> real doxygen parser in any way. If not, was there some reason for not 
>> re-using the already existing open source doxygen parser? Or is the 
>> structure of doxygen comments pretty easy that writing your own one 
>> fairly trivial?
> 
> Note that Doxygen is GPL, so we would have to convince the authors to
> relicense the parser code to incorporate it into SWIG.  We did consider
> asking them, but it's a very simpler grammar and we suspected that the
> effort to implement it would be comparable to adapting an existing
> parser anyway.

Ah okay thanks for update.

William