Overview

This is an evaluation of Natural Docs (http://www.naturaldocs.org/) on Ada sources.  I discovered Natural Docs thanks to Sam’s paper (http://www.ada-france.org/article106.html) on Ada-France web.  I was curious about it: is it possible to get some pretty documentation extracted from the sources, without special tags cluttering the code?

A brief conclusion is that, provided some minor constraints on sources presentation, Natural Docs is useful and easy to use.

Here are the constraints :

1for packages/procedures/functions, start the comments with (example for package) :
-- Package: Autolayout
2use the same syntax for your own heading, for example :
-- Performance:
3put a blank comment line after each heading.

Results at a glance :

Note 1 : those pages are also generated by Natural Docs

Note 2 : in version 1.22, Natural Docs expect Ada file’s suffix to be .ada.  You must change ‘ada’ with [‘ada’, ‘ads’, ‘adb’] in the NaturalDocs::Languages::Ada->New call in the NaturalDocs perl script if you want ads/adb files to be processed.

Lionel Draghi, April 04.