Question Dynamic help files

Greetings all,

I've been a little lazy in manually editing the help.hlp file with every code change so I'm pondering how best to implement dynamic help files that pull from the *.c files instead during compile.

My initial thought is to do something similar to javadocs. Such that if I modify the function foo(), I can modify the commented header of the function and the dynamic help would pull from that header.

However, if I remember correctly, comments are stripped out in the preprocessor in C.

If I create foo_help() function I could perhaps query it before the help_table checks help.hlp.  I guess it seems almost as tedious as editing help.hlp.  At least it would be in the same file though.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here?  Is this too much heavy lifting for a procedural language like C?

Thoughts?

Thanks, folks.

-Salty

There's a system not too far removed from what you're talking about; www.doxygen.nl/

But - this is relatively important - this is just as much work. You will not be doing any less work just because the text is somewhere else. Also, you'll still need to extract and parse the docs for use internally. Also, you'll need to stick to a common format for the mud user to actually be able to use the output.

I'm not sure you'll save much time, compared to just updating help.hlp.

Hrm, that project looks great but more work than just editing help.hlp

I guess I just need to get better at documentation.

Thanks Thomas