Re: Synopsis as documentation tool

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 00:42 -0800, TR wrote:
> Seems pretty ambitious. I'd be interested in hearing a description of how such 
> a thing might be accomplished.
> 
> -TR

nomenclature can be obtain from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_flow

Seeing "control flow statements" like a node in a graph.
This node will have outgoing branches;
- we want the number of those branches.

Branches will normally reduce/merge at predefine nodes.

Human brains work best when this information have a graphical
representation (synopsis already use graphviz).


Synopsis is not ready for this yet.
- missing label list in function-body production.
- scopes introduce by declaration in block statement.  You can not jump
  in a middle of a scope.


Example of use of this information is typically shown by optimization
steps.  Optimization will take different paths depending on desired
effects.

Typical applications will want
- analysis/comprehension of the code.
- transformations, code injections. 
- QA analysis

hope this help

> On Mon December 12 2005 3:53 pm, Gilles J. Seguin wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 08:49 -0500, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> > > Tom Russell wrote:
> > > > I looked into using Synopsis to generate control-flow diagrams as
> > > > documentation for C code. This was a while back. I didn't get far, as I
> > > > was waiting for an engineer at work to show me how it might be useful.
> > > > The last news I got was that, since our code uses function pointers
> > > > extensively, that this probably wouldn't be worth the effort. I assume
> > > > this is correct.
> > >
> > > Right. Synopsis presently doesn't provide the required analysis, though
> > > something like that would be a very useful extension. As always,
> > > contributions are very much appreciated.
> >
> > It is on my TODO list also