[racket] extracting "docstrings" from documentation

10 minutes ago, Matthew Flatt wrote:
> I don't know that anything better is available right now, but maybe the
> question should be: What should Scribble provide?
> 
> Originally, I had in mind including docstring-like information in the
> cross-reference output of a Scribble document. That approach would work
> badly with the current implementation of cross-reference information,
> however, because the information already takes too much memory. (On a
> 32-bit machine, around 20MB of DrRacket's initial footprint is
> cross-reference information for installed documentation, and that cost
> doubles when online check syntax is enabled.) Probably cross-reference
> information should actually be in a database, instead of a serialized
> hash table, but I haven't yet tried anything in that direction.
> 
> Any other ideas?

IIUC (guessing that this is the usual use case for docstrings), then
the text renderer seems close enough -- maybe some extension for it
that

*  ignores text that doesn't document a specific binding (and maybe
   also description text that is too long for a short docstring),

* and instead of spitting out the texts into a file, will put them all
  indexed in some way (either a file with some very simple info-style
  markup or a db)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!