| Developer(s) | Apple Inc. |
|---|---|
| Initial release | September 13, 2000 |
| Stable release | 8.9 / June 8, 2009 |
| Written in | Perl, C (helpers) |
| Operating system | Mac OS X, UNIX, Linux |
| Type | Documentation generator |
| License | Apple Public Source License 2.0 |
| Website | developer |
HeaderDoc is a documentation generator developed and maintained by Apple Inc. Using specially commented source code files as input, HeaderDoc generates documentation for the code in HTML or XML format. Syntax for HeaderDoc comment tags is largely similar to, and as of HeaderDoc version 8, supportive of Javadoc tags. HeaderDoc 8.7 and later also provides partial support for many Doxygen tags (@ form only, and must conform to HeaderDoc tag ordering rules). Apple's HeaderDoc project is free, open source software distributed under the Apple Public Source License.
The HeaderDoc tool set consists of the main utility, headerdoc2html, and gatherheaderdoc. The headerdoc2html tool generates a directory of either HTML (or optionally XML) files from the commented source files specified. Afterwards, the gatherheaderdoc utility may be executed to create a table of contents file for the documentation. Finally, the resolveLinks utility may be used to resolve cross-references between multiple documentation collections.
Apple's Xcode development environment contains features designed to assist the process of creating documentation using the HeaderDoc syntax and tools.
HeaderDoc has the following core features:
The HeaderDoc suite also includes several tools that may be used independently:
 | This programming-tool-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
GNU Bison, commonly known as Bison, is a parser generator that is part of the GNU Project. Bison reads a specification of a context-free language, warns about any parsing ambiguities, and generates a parser which reads sequences of tokens and decides whether the sequence conforms to the syntax specified by the grammar. The generated parsers are portable: they do not require any specific compilers. Bison by default generates LALR(1) parsers but it can also generate canonical LR, IELR(1) and GLR parsers.
Doxygen is a documentation generator, a tool for writing software reference documentation. The documentation is written within code, and is thus relatively easy to keep up to date. Doxygen can cross reference documentation and code, so that the reader of a document can easily refer to the actual code.
ROBODoc is a documentation tool similar to Javadoc and licensed under the GPL. It is used to extract API documentation from source code. It can be used with any language that supports comments and works by extracting specially formatted headers. These are then reformatted into HTML, DocBook, TROFF, ASCII, LaTeX, PDF, or RTF.
Ctags is a programming tool that generates an index file of names found in source and header files of various programming languages to aid code comprehension. Depending on the language, functions, variables, class members, macros and so on may be indexed. These tags allow definitions to be quickly and easily located by a text editor, a code search engine, or other utility. Alternatively, there is also an output mode that generates a cross reference file, listing information about various names found in a set of language files in human-readable form.
In computer-based language recognition, ANTLR, or ANother Tool for Language Recognition, is a parser generator that uses LL(*) for parsing. ANTLR is the successor to the Purdue Compiler Construction Tool Set (PCCTS), first developed in 1989, and is under active development. Its maintainer is Professor Terence Parr of the University of San Francisco.
Plain Old Documentation (pod) is a lightweight markup language used to document the Perl programming language.
Javadoc is a documentation generator created by Sun Microsystems for the Java language for generating API documentation in HTML format from Java source code. The HTML format is used for adding the convenience of being able to hyperlink related documents together.
In computing, a here document is a file literal or input stream literal: it is a section of a source code file that is treated as if it were a separate file. The term is also used for a form of multiline string literals that use similar syntax, preserving line breaks and other whitespace in the text.
In the macOS, iOS, NeXTSTEP, and GNUstep programming frameworks, property list files are files that store serialized objects. Property list files use the filename extension .plist, and thus are often referred to as p-list files.
Ddoc is a compiler-embedded documentation generator and associated syntax, for the D programming language, designed by Walter Bright. Its emphasis is on being able to write documentation in code comments in a natural style, minimizing the need for embedded markup and thus improving the legibility of the code comments. It is similar in concept to Doxygen and Javadoc.
In computer programming, boilerplate code or just boilerplate are sections of code that are repeated in multiple places with little to no variation. When using languages that are considered verbose, the programmer must write a lot of code to accomplish only minor functionality. Such code is called boilerplate.
Sandcastle is a documentation generator from Microsoft. It automatically produces MSDN-style code documentation out of reflection information of .NET assemblies and XML documentation comments found in the source code of these assemblies. It can also be used to produce user documentation from Microsoft Assistance Markup Language (MAML) with the same look and feel as reference documentation.
This comparison of programming languages compares the features of language syntax (format) for over 50 computer programming languages.
In computer programming, a comment is a programmer-readable explanation or annotation in the source code of a computer program. They are added with the purpose of making the source code easier for humans to understand, and are generally ignored by compilers and interpreters. The syntax of comments in various programming languages varies considerably.
JSDoc is a markup language used to annotate JavaScript source code files. Using comments containing JSDoc, programmers can add documentation describing the application programming interface of the code they're creating. This is then processed, by various tools, to produce documentation in accessible formats like HTML and Rich Text Format. The JSDoc specification is released under CC BY-SA 3.0, while its companion documentation generator and parser library is free software under the Apache License 2.0.
The Java Development Kit (JDK) is an implementation of either one of the Java Platform, Standard Edition, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, or Java Platform, Micro Edition platforms released by Oracle Corporation in the form of a binary product aimed at Java developers on Solaris, Linux, macOS or Windows. The JDK includes a private JVM and a few other resources to finish the development of a Java application. Since the introduction of the Java platform, it has been by far the most widely used Software Development Kit (SDK).
Google Closure Tools is a set of tools to help developers build rich web applications with JavaScript. It was developed by Google for use in their web applications such as Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Perl programming language:
