Like JavaDoc, the PlDoc infrastructure is based on structured
comments. Using comments, no changes have to be made to Prolog to
load the documented source. If the library(pldoc) library
is loaded, Prolog will not only load the source, but also parse all
structured comments. It processes the mode-declarations inside the
comments and stores these as annotations in the Prolog database to
support the test framework and other runtime and compiletime analysis
tools that may be developed in the future.
Documentation for all or some of the loaded files can be written to file in either HTML+CSS or LaTeX (see section 10.5) format. Each source file is documented in a single file. In addition, the documentation generator will generate an index file that can be used as an index for a browser or input file for LaTeX for producing nicely typeset document.
To support the developer, the documentation system can be asked to start a web-server that can be used to browse the documentation.