[Doc-SIG] Parro-DL -- new documentation project

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Announcing a new joint documentation effort...


                                  Parro-DL

                        Parrot Documentation Language


With the public announcement of the development of Parrot (see
http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/31/206248 and
http://www.python.org/parrot.htm), a new documentation effort is being
initiated to provide developer information on the new language and its
libraries.

Guido van Rossum and Larry Wall, joint creators of the new language,
are both aware of the significance of quality documentation in the
adoption of Parrot.  Shortly after the decision to create Parrot, they
enlisted Fred Drake and Tom Christiansen to begin work on the
documentation system for Parrot.  The two advocates of language and
library documentation have collaborated privately for the past six
months to design a new markup language that can be embedded into the
language or used indepentently, similar to POD, but which allows
richer semantic markup similar to the LaTeX-based markup used by the
Python documentation project.

Drake and Christiansen expect to release the reference manual for the
new markup language, call Parro-DL (for "Parrot Documentation
Language") within two weeks.  The specification, which weighs in at
about 150 typeset pages, was written in Parro-DL and is processed by
new tools written using an early prototype interpreter for the Parrot
language.  The specification includes information on syntax,
linguistic integration, and processing expectations.  ISO
standardization is expected to be complete in 3rd quarter of 2006.

Drake and Christiansen are joining their efforts to organize a
documentation project dedicated to producing free documentation for
Parrot to avoid a monopoly on the reference documentation by the
technical publisher O'Reilly.  The effort will be subsidized by their
new joint venture, Iterpolated Documentation Systems.  Offices for the
new firm will be located in Chicago.  Drake's separation from
PythonLabs came as a surprise to his colleagues there.



  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Digital Creations