How do I document the members of a struct so that Documenter generates documentation for them? """ This is an X """ struct X "This is a" a::String "This is b" b::Char "This is c" c end

I have no idea if there’s a better/canonical way, but I’ve done something like this in the past: """ This is an `X` # Fields - a: First letter of the English alphabet - b: Second letter of the English alphabet - c: C is for cookie """ struct X a::String b::Char c end This may be reall…

How would you want to access it? Keep in mind that once I do X.a, that’s just a String. Julia has no knowledge that X.a came from the struct X, without metaprogramming.

True; but that’s irrelevant to the documentation, which is about what to expect when doing X.a.

That would be fine if they were private (and required accessors) but as it is I can X.a, so it should be possible to document what to expect when doing that (e.g. ? X.a should work).

There is a difference between being considered private and enforcing that the attributes are externally inaccessible. Julia considers some things nonpublic but doesn’t enforce their inaccessibility.

Maybe I’m not (noob) seeing the wisdom of making it impossible to document (in the usual way) something that’s “considered” non-public if it in fact is publicly accessible.

It doesn’t make much sense to me that we conflate “documented” with “guaranteed to be forward compatible”, but here we are.

https://github.com/JuliaDocs/DocStringExtensions.jl has FIELDS and TYPEDFIELDS which can be used for automatically embedding field docs in the main docstring: julia> using DocStringExtensions julia> """ This is an X $(FIELDS) """ struct X "This is a" …

That looks good. But how do I use that to build docs. When I cd MY_PKG (...) pkg> activate . julia> using Revise julia> include("docs/make.jl") (after add DocStringExtensions to docs and putting using DocStringExtensions in make.jl, both of which I assume are necessary) I get ERROR: LoadError: …

Documenting elements of a struct

New to Julia

jzr July 16, 2021, 8:01pm 2

Fwiw some people feel that struct properties should be considered private and shouldn’t be publicly documented, preferring accessor functions instead.

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Documenting elements of a struct

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