Re: Package naming conventions

Pascal Bourguignon <[email protected]> writes:

> Nikodemus Siivola writes:
>>  * Packages have category tags and a description. An CMUCL-specific
>>    XML parser might belong to categories Text, XML, Parser, CMUCL.
>> 
>>    Packages that don't have any implementation tags are automatically
>>    tagged "Portable".
>
> The description  is named documentation. 

Possibly, just possibly, you have chosen the wrong meaning of
"package" to discuss here; we're not talking about Lisp packages,
mostly, we're talking about packages of software.  At least, I hope
that none of my systems which could end up in this space are
restricted to using only one Lisp package, and while some notional
"interface" Lisp package might be a suitable place to hang an overview
description, it might equally well not be.

> When defining  a package, you
> can set a documention string:
>
>     (DEFPACKAGE "COM.EXAMPLE.DOCUMENTED"
>       (:DOCUMENTATION "Exemple de documentation."))
>
> Unfortunately, I've  not found any  way to recover  this documentation
> string, given  the name of the package.   Even (DESCRIBE (FIND-PACKAGE
> NAME)) in  clisp does not display  it. The standard  doc-types for the
> DOCUMENTATION     function      are:     COMPILER-MACRO,     FUNCTION,
> METHOD-COMBINATION, SETF, STRUCTURE, T, TYPE, and VARIABLE.

As is clearly stated in the CLHS page for DOCUMENTATION:

  (documentation (find-package name) t)

>>  * Provide a tool to search by categories, etc.
>
> Why not search on the documentation strings rather?

Because documentation strings are unstructured.  If you're going to
write your documentation strings in French, English search terms might
not have the best of luck in finding your packages.

Christophe
-- 
http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~csr21/       +44 1223 510 299/+44 7729 383 757
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