Generating loadparm from our XML documentation

[David Collier-Brown]

On 01/09/2014 12:20 PM, Michael Adam wrote:
> We certainly discussed this more than once, and I definitely
> said I would love to introduce once central place to store
> all information about a parameter, and generate all and doc
> from that. I would even be surprised if anyone would
> question this.
>
> But I definitely never suggested to generate code from the xml
> docs. Instead, what I suggested at the time is to have one
> central python program to generate all code and the xml doc
> sources for the parameters from python data structures.
>
My experience with Donald Knuth's /tangle/ and /weave/ programs suggest
this is a good idea for anything where the description is substantially
larger than the code.  If you can find a copy of the TeXBook, look at
the first quarter or so. Conversely, if the code is much larger than the
document, tangle/weave is overkill: see the last quarter of the TeXBook
for that.

I've not done this with XML, but it took about a man-day to recreate
tangle, so it shouldn't take more than a week fiddling with XML parsers
(;-))

--dave


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David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
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