Mentors

Slava Pestov

Daniel Ehrenberg

Technical outline

The Factor documentation could use some improvements in terms of performance and ease of use.

• Currently, in the development image, all documentation of all loaded vocabularies is stored in memory. Moving this into an on-disc database could reduce the footprint of Factor and make documentation searches more efficient.
• Documentation is currently written in a syntax that uses the basic Factor reader--essentially, in s-expressions. While this is nicely extensible and easy to learn, a different syntax could be easier to write while retaining these properties. Farkup syntax may be a starting point, but the syntax must expose semantic properties of documentation that can be analyzed by tools like help lint.

Benefit to the student

The student would learn about on-line help systems, databases, syntax design and parsing.

Benefit to the community

Factor users would have a more efficient and easy-to-use help system.