Development and implementation of a highly automated documentation generator for the Oz programming language

Details

Supervisors

Van Roy, Peter

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil en informatique

Abstract

The Oz programming language has been helping students in learning and easily understanding the intricacies of all the different types of programming paradigms and their associated programming languages, particularly at Université Catholique de Louvain, where several courses use Oz as a . Such an important learning instrument could not be left without a proper documentation generator, a feature taken for granted by most popular languages. For that reason, we have created OzDoc. OzDoc has been inspired by modern state-of-the-art documentation generators. This paper explores the selling points and downsides of contemporary popular documentation generators in an attempt to take the best out of each and avoid anything potentially unfavorable. The focus is mainly on the design of the best possible parser and documentation file generator, for which we make several case studies. We present the evolution of the OzDoc tool in time, what lead us to take specific implementation decisions concerning the design of OzDoc, and what the tool's final version became. The grammar, lexer, parser and file generator are all explored in details. The end result is an incredibly flexible, robust and expandable framework, that is also compatible with other languages. Testing showed that the final documentation files are still considered a bit too verbose, but the great modularity and adaptability of the tool will allow anyone to comfortably improve it over the following years thanks to the feedback of users, researchers and students. A user manual is available at the end to the user who simply wants to the use the tool, and a developer manual is also provided for anyone who wants to contribute to the growth of OzDoc.