YARD-Heuristics

YARD-Heuristics heuristically determines types of parameters and return
values for YARD documentation that doesn’t explicitly document it.  This
allows you to write documentation that isn’t adorned with “obvious” types,
but still get that information into the output.  It also lets you
nice-looking references to parameters and have them be marked up
appropriately in HTML output.

§ Heuristics

The following sections list the various heuristics that YARD-Heuristics
apply for determining types of parameters and return values.

Note that for all heuristics, a type will only be added if none already
exists.

§ Parameter Named “other”

  A parameter named “other” has the same type as the receiver.  This turns

    class Point
      def ==(other)

  into

    class Point
      # @param [Point] other
      def ==(other)

§ Parameter Types Derived by Parameter Name

  Parameters to a method with names in the following table has the type
  listed on the same row.

| Name   | Type      |
|--------+-----------|
| index  | [Integer] |
| object | [Object]  |
| range  | [Range]   |
| string | [String]  |

  Thus

    class Point
      def x_inside?(range)

  becomes

    class Point
      # @param [Range] range
      def x_inside?(range)

§ Block Parameters

  If the last parameter to a method’s name begins with ‘&’ it has the type
  [Proc].

    class Method
      def initialize(&block)

  becomes

    class Method
      # @param [Block] block
      def initialize(&block)

§ Return Types by Method Name

  For the return type of a method with less than two ‹@return› tags, the
  method name is lookup up in the following table and has the type listed on
  the same row. For the “type” “self or type”, if a ‹@param› tag exists with
  the name “other”, the type of the receiver is used, otherwise “self” is
  used.  For the “type” “type”, the type of the receiver is used.

| Name            | Type           |
|-----------------+----------------|
| ‹<<›            | self or type   |
| ‹>>›            | self or type   |
| ‹==›            | [Boolean]      |
| ‹===›           | [Boolean]      |
| ‹=~›            | [Boolean]      |
| ‹<=>›           | [Integer, nil] |
| ‹+›             | type           |
| ‹-›             | type           |
| ‹*›             | type           |
| ‹/›             | type           |
| each            | [self]         |
| each_with_index | [self]         |
| hash            | [Integer]      |
| inspect         | [String]       |
| length          | [Integer]      |
| size            | [Integer]      |
| to_s            | [String]       |
| to_str          | [String]       |


  Thus

    class Point
      def <<(other)

  becomes

    class Point
      # @return [Point]
      def <<(other)

  but

    class List
      def <<(item)

  becomes

    class List
      # @return [self]
      def <<(item)

§ Emphasizing Parameter Names

When producing HTML output, any words in all uppercase, with a possible
“th” suffix, that is also the name of a parameter, an ‹@option›, or a
‹@yieldparam›, will be downcased and emphasized with a class of
“parameter”.

In the following example, “OTHER” will be turned into
‹<em class="parameter">other</em>›:

  class Point
    # @return True if the receiver’s class and {#x} and {#y} `#==` those of
    #   OTHER
    def ==(other)

§ Usage

Add ‹--plugin yard-heuristics-1.0› to your YARD command line.  If you’re
using Inventory-Rake-Tasks-YARD¹, add the following to your Rakefile:

  Inventory::Rake::Tasks::YARD.new do |t|
    t.options += %w'--plugin yard-heuristics-1.0'
  end

¹ See http://disu.se/software/inventory-rake-tasks-yard/

§ API

There’s really not very much to the YARD-Heuristics API.  What you can do
is add (or modify) the types of parameters and return types of methods by
adding (or modifying) entries in the Hash tables
‹YARDHeuristics::ParamTypes› and ‹YARDHeuristics::ReturnTypes›
respectively.  That’s about it.

§ Financing

Currently, most of my time is spent at my day job and in my rather busy
private life.  Please motivate me to spend time on this piece of software
by donating some of your money to this project.  Yeah, I realize that
requesting money to develop software is a bit, well, capitalistic of me.
But please realize that I live in a capitalistic society and I need money
to have other people give me the things that I need to continue living
under the rules of said society.  So, if you feel that this piece of
software has helped you out enough to warrant a reward, please PayPal a
donation to now@disu.se¹.  Thanks!  Your support won’t go unnoticed!

¹ Send a donation:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&business=now@disu.se&item_name=YARD-Heuristics

§ Reporting Bugs

Please report any bugs that you encounter to the {issue tracker}¹.

¹ See https://github.com/now/yard-heuristics/issues

§ Authors

Nikolai Weibull wrote the code, the tests, and this README.

§ Licensing

YARD-Heuristics is free software: you may redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the {GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3}¹ or
later², as published by the {Free Software Foundation}³.

¹ See http://disu.se/licenses/lgpl-3.0/ ² See http://gnu.org/licenses/ ³ See http://fsf.org/