**Auto Documentation Tool for Tcl**

    * Mentor: [Arnulf Wiedemann]
    * Difficulty: easy

[apw] There are some Tcl tools for doing [javadoc] like documentation using inline comments with special tags like [tcldoc], [autodoc] and [zdoc]. The problem of all of these is, that they only support "normal" Tcl programs. What is missing is support for [namespace]s, [itcl] or [itcl-ng] and [TclOO]. 

I have started building a Tcl program called itcldoc.tcl based on a script level version of [itcl-ng] called [itclng] to use the parser available there for the [itcl] syntax and by adding some more parsing routines for "normal" Tcl code, [namespace] eval code and [TclOO] code. This program is used to parse all the variables, commons, methods, procs and comment blocks which are placed before that kind of code as well as references to variables and store them in [dict]s on a file level base. With that parsed information [html] pages could be built to show cross reference listings, descriptions of code or the source code with mixed in links for variables, procs, methods etc. when they are referenced or called in the code.

The [itclng] project can be found here [http://sourceforge.net/projects/itclng/] and the command for building the dicts (itcldoc.tcl) and can be found here [http://itclng.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/itclng/itclng/]

Benefit for student: learn a lot about Tcl and its possibilities to parse different kind of source code as well as get experience in generating [html] code for web pages eventually using [ATWF].

Benefit for community: provide an up-to-date tool for auto documentation (and maybe also a base for debugging tools based on these [dict]s?)