I officially started on my Google Summer of Code project (project details here) last weekend.
I’ve been tasked with writing a perldoc equivalent for Perl 6. I’ve decided
to write it in Perl 5 for now, since it’s already got Perl6::Perldoc, which
is a fast and feature-complete parser for the Perl 6 version of Pod (see
specification), as well as lots of other
useful CPAN modules which I won’t have to rewrite in Perl 6 (yet).
The program will be called grok
(repository). So far it’s just a barebones
command-line reader for Pod 6, but I did create an ANSI-colored terminal
renderer for Perl6::Perldoc. It might be too colorful for some people’s
taste currently, so maybe I’ll tone it down a little. I think Ruby’s ri
documentation reader is the only such tool which colors the output, and I
thought it was a nice enough feature (one of many!) to copy. I’ve also been
looking at pydoc and javadoc in search of interesting features to
implement.
The plan is to make it more modern and extensive than perldoc. One
interesting thing I might end up doing is making use of STD (the standard
Perl 6 grammar) to parse arbitrary syntax, so you could do stuff like grok
'[*]' and the program would tease the expression apart and show you
documentation for both the [] and the * operators.
Some portion of the project also includes writing new documentation for Perl 6. I haven’t written any yet, but I bet it will be fun. Before doing so, we first have to figure out how to organize the the docs. Since Perl 6 is a specification, it’s not as obvious as with Perl 5, where the docs are included (sometimes inline) with the implementation.