TADS3 Library Proto-Documentation

In desperate need of something resembling documentation for the TADS3 libraries, I hacked together a C# program to read the TADS3 library files and generate documentation based on the comments therein.

My parser is really stupid, and depends on the formatting of the source files. Some of the generated documentation is bogus, but such cases should be obvious.

Browse A Sample of the Generated Documentation

Note that this is only a sample, and not the complete documentation, which takes up more disk space than I can afford on my web server.

Download the Complete Documentation Files (docs.zip, 2.4mb)

This is a set of HTML files, which should work on any system with a reasonable browser. Unzipped, they take up about 14mb of disk space.

Download the DocGen Windows executable (DocGen.zip, 22kb)

To run this, you need to have the .Net framework installed on your system. The .Net framework is freely available from Microsoft. Run DocGen from the command line with arguments similar to this:

DocGen TADS3/include/*.h TADS3/lib/*.t TADS3/lib/adv3/*.t TADS3/lib/adv3/*.h TADS3/lib/adv3/en_us/*.t TADS3/lib/adv3/en_us/*.h -i Intro.html -v "3.0.6g" -o Output

"TADS3" indicates the directory containing the TADS3 documentation. "Output" is the name of the output directory into which the documentation will be generated. The file "Intro.html" is included in DocGen.zip.

Download the C# Documentation Generator Source (sources.zip, 26kb)

The program is written in C#, for which I make no apology: I like C#. It is sufficiently close to Java and C++ that translating it should be very straightforward. You can get a free C# compiler for Windows machines from Microsoft.

Comments and suggestions are welcome, but I wrote this primarily for my own use, so I don't promise to act on them. I also don't promise to faithfully keep the documentation up-to-date with the latest version of TADS3.

Edward L. Stauff ed@mewsic.REMOVE_THIS_SPAMGUARD.com

Revision History

3 August 2003 - fixed a bug which caused the program to crash if given an empty ".h" file. Added a version number to the program (0.3). Added a download file for just the executable.

13 June 2003 - changes backslashes to slashes in HTML links. Added parsing of "modify". Fixed some bugs. Began work on macro expansion (doesn't work yet).

10 June 2003 - added copies of source files; added global variables, objects & functions; broke up symbol index into individual letter files; moved stuff into directories.

8 June 2003 - first version posted.