Factor/GSoC/2010/Improve help system
Mentors
Slava Pestov
Daniel Ehrenberg
Technical outline
The Factor documentation could use some improvements in terms of performance and ease of use.
- Currently, in the development image, all documentation of all loaded vocabularies is stored in memory. Moving this into an on-disc database could reduce the footprint of Factor and make documentation searches more efficient.
- Documentation is currently written in a syntax that uses the basic Factor reader--essentially, in s-expressions. While this is nicely extensible and easy to learn, a different syntax could be easier to write while retaining these properties. Farkup syntax may be a starting point, but the syntax must expose semantic properties of documentation that can be analyzed by tools like help lint.
Benefit to the student
The student would learn about on-line help systems, databases, syntax design and parsing.
Benefit to the community
Factor users would have a more efficient and easy-to-use help system.
This revision created on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:00:41 by littledan