Note: information on this page refers to Ceylon 1.0, not to the current release.

Markdown

The ceylon doc tool assumes the arguments of the doc, by, deprecated, throws, and license annotations are formatted using Markdown syntax.

Usage

See the Markdown documentation for examples.

Description

The Markdown syntax is well documented on the linked site.

Markdown is intended to be very close to plain text. The means that the documentation is easily read when viewing source code.

Syntax highlighting

More often than not code blocks within documentation will be snippets of Ceylon source code. Therefore the default behavior is to syntax-highlight codeblocks as if they were Ceylon source code.

When the code block does not contain Ceylon source code, fenced code blocks may be used to disable syntax highlighting.

Code blocks

The usual Markdown syntax for code blocks is just to indent the code using 4 spaces:

"You can call this method like this:

     Anything result = method();"
void method() {}

Fenced code blocks

As an extension to the basic Markdown syntax, ceylon doc supports Github-style "fenced code blocks". A fenced code block doesn't require indentation, but "fences" the code block with a line starting with a sequence of three or more tildes (~~~):

"You can call this method like this:
 ~~~
 Anything result = method();
 ~~~"
void method() {}

You can state the language being used in the code block by following the tildes with the name of the language.

"Documentation can contain XML:
 ~~~xml
 <p>If I never see another angle-bracket again,
    I won't be sorry.</p>
 ~~~
 Or Java:
 ~~~java
 List<String> strings = new ArrayList<>();
 ~~~"
void method() {}

Supported syntaxes include:

  • Java
  • XML

Unsupported syntaxes are not highlighted at all.

As an extension to the basic Markdown syntax, ceylon doc supports "Wiki-style" links for linking to the documentation of other declarations. These links are enclosed within double square brackets, [[ and ]]:

"This method returns [[Anything]]."
Anything method() => null;

"Prints the given object's [[Object.string]]."
void printString(Object obj) => print(obj.string);

The link text will be the name of the linked-to declaration, output using <code> tags (therefore rendered by the browser in a monospaced typeface).

You can specify a different link text by including it before the name of the linked-to declaration, separating the two with a pipe |:

"This method returns a [[whole number|Integer]]."
Integer method() => 1;

In this case the link text will not be output using <code> tags.

The declaration name can be fully qualified, using :: to separate the package part of the fully qualified name from the declaration part. This is useful when you need to refer to a declaration which has not been imported by the current compilation unit.

"This method actually returns a [[com.example.foo::Foo]]"
Anything method() => createFoo();

See also