One of the major problems that software library writers face, particularly in
a research environment, is the generation of documentation.
Producing good,
professional-quality documentation is tedious and time consuming.
Often, no documentation is
produced. For many users, however, much of the need for
documentation may be satisfied by a brief description of the purpose and use
of the routines and their arguments. Even for more complete,
hand-generated documentation,
this information provides a convenient starting point. We
describe here a tool that may be used to generate documentation about programs
written in the C language. It uses a structured comment convention that
preserves the original C source code and does not require any additional
files. The markup language is designed to be an almost invisible
structured comment in the C source code, retaining readability in the
original source.
Documentation in a form suitable for the Unix man program (nroff), LaTeX, and
the World Wide Web can be produced.
The output format is controlled by easily modified tables, permitting
customization of the output.
Support for other languages is also provided, though with fewer features.