Sustainable, Extensible Documentation Generation Using inlinedocs

This article presents inlinedocs, an R package for generating documentation from comments. The concept of structured, interwoven code and documentation has existed for many years, but existing systems that implement this for the R programming language do not tightly integrate with R code, leading to...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Toby Dylan Hocking, Thomas Wutzler, Keith Ponting, Philippe Grosjean
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Foundation for Open Access Statistics 2013-09-01
Series:Journal of Statistical Software
Online Access:http://www.jstatsoft.org/index.php/jss/article/view/2086
Description
Summary:This article presents inlinedocs, an R package for generating documentation from comments. The concept of structured, interwoven code and documentation has existed for many years, but existing systems that implement this for the R programming language do not tightly integrate with R code, leading to several drawbacks. This article attempts to address these issues and presents 2 contributions for documentation generation for the R community. First, we propose a new syntax for inline documentation of R code within comments adjacent to the relevant code, which allows for highly readable and maintainable code and documentation. Second, we propose an extensible system for parsing these comments, which allows the syntax to be easily augmented.
ISSN:1548-7660