The "D Programming Language Specification" seems to be the most important documentation for D. Is it really only available as Mobi? That is the most bizarre choice of format I've ever seen.

Chris

On Saturday, 18 September 2021 at 20:40:56 UTC, Chris_D wrote:

No, it's not only available as mobi. It's also right here: https://dlang.org/spec/spec.html

Thanks for the replies.

jfondren: Sorry, but I am talking about documentation. For me, online web pages don't qualify; they are in the cloud, unreal, with no substance. Does anyone really read 300 pages online, in a web browser? Of course not.

Jordi Sayol: PDF! ePub! Now that's what I call documentation!

But that's on SourceForge. My first port of call to learn about D was, and is, dlang.org, where the only links to the "D Programming Language Specification" in any downloadable format are for the Mobi.

Chris

On Tuesday, 21 September 2021 at 16:14:52 UTC, Chris_D wrote:

You can download them to a local copy, and you can generate them locally. But usually I am not reading 300 pages but going to a specific part of the documentation to look a specific thing up, and there I'm usually online anyway.

As a thing to read from beginning to end rather than a spot reference I think the current spec would be very wanting for a few reasons, like internal hyperlinks and little of the justificatory text that 'annotated' specifications tend to have. For a recent example, in https://dlang.org/spec/garbage.html it just says "Do not misalign pointers if those pointers may point into the GC heap". Why not? If you can get away with it on a particular architecture, maybe it's fine? Actually, it's a big deal.

What I'd like is Perl's offline documentation. Just type 'perldoc perl' into a unix system and look at it. Or 'perldoc -f stat', 'perldoc -q columns'.

I haven't had consistent results with requesting updates to the online docs, but you could try just adding a link to this page. There are other offsite links and they occasionally need tending to, as well.

A more immediate place to make a change is https://wiki.dlang.org/The_D_Programming_Language , where it'd be very easily to slide a few extra links onto the 'D Language Specification' link at the top right.

The wiki isn't only accessible through Community/Wiki; several of the Resources links on dlang.org also point to it.

On Tuesday, 21 September 2021 at 16:14:52 UTC, Chris_D wrote:

I do! As far as I know, that's how most D users read the D docs. The docs do ship with DMD, though. On Windows, there's an html folder in the installation tree. I don't know how they're installed on other platforms.