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Multiline API documentation

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Domain
api, documentation

Research direction

The issue names no source files or tests. Start by reviewing the current ACT IDL syntax for method descriptions, then determine how multiline element-form documentation should be represented and verify that the chosen form is accepted and preserves the full content.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Documentation for elements in ACT IDL is currently specified like so:

<method name="Frobricate"
        description="An extremely useful method"/>

Having the description as an attribute makes perfect sense, but when writing an IDL file it makes it very hard to provide comprehensive documentation.

It would be nice, for example, to be able to provide documentation in element form also:

<method name="Frobricate"
        ...>
  <description>

    An extremely useful method.

    This is an implementation of Fred Frobricator's notion of _Frobrication_, introduced in
    the 1867 paper 'On Frobrication', of which you can find a copy here:

        https://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frobrication

  </description>
</method>

(Also happy with any other solution that allows for documentation in a similar for to my example, be it a different syntax for specifying an attribute of which I am unaware, special comments, or whatever.)

Dominant language
Go
Stars
54
Forks
26
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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