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