lpdoc
is an automatic program documentation generator for (C)LP systems.
lpdoc
generates a reference manual automatically from one or more source files for a logic program (including ISO-Prolog, Ciao, many CLP systems, ...). It is particularly useful for documenting library modules, for which it automatically generates a description of the module interface. However,
lpdoc
can also be used quite successfully to document full applications and to generate nicely formatted plain ascii "readme" files. A fundamental advantage of using
lpdoc
to document programs is that it is much easier to maintain a true correspondence between the program and its documentation, and to identify precisely to what version of the program a given printed manual corresponds.
The quality of the documentation generated can be greatly enhanced by including within the program text:
The assertions and comments included in the source file need to be written using the Ciao system assertion language. A simple compatibility library is available to make traditional (constraint) logic programming systems ignore these assertions and comments allowing normal treatment of programs documented in this way.
The documentation is currently generated first in
texinfo
format. From the
texinfo
output, printed and on-line manuals in several formats (dvi, ps, info, html, etc.) can be easily generated automatically, using publicly available tools.
lpdoc
can also generate 'man' pages (Unix man page format) as well as brief descriptions in html or emacs info formats suitable for inclusion in an on-line index of applications. In particular,
lpdoc
can create and maintain fully automatically
WWW and
info sites containing on-line versions of the documents it produces.
The
lpdoc
manual (and the Ciao system manuals) are generated by
lpdoc
.
lpdoc
is distributed under the
GNU general public license.
Note:
lpdoc
is currently fully supported only on Linux and other Un*x-like systems, due to the use of
Makefile
s and other Un*x-related utilities. It is possible to run
lpdoc
under Win32 using Cygwin
. A version which is written entirely in Prolog and will thus run standalone also on Win32 is currently under beta testing.
This documentation corresponds to version 1.9#57 (2002/1/5, 0:47:15 CET).
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.