RbG: A documentation generator for scientific and engineering software

Abstract

This paper demonstrates RbG, a new tool intended for the generation of high-quality documentation from source code of scientific and engineering applications. RbG extracts mathematical formulae and decision tables from program statements by means of static code analysis and generates corresponding documentation in the Open Document Format or LaTeX. Annotations in source code comments are used to define the structure of the generated documents, include additional textual and graphical descriptions, and control extraction of formulae on a fine-grained level. Furthermore, RbG provides an interpreter to generate function plots for extracted formulae. In this tool demonstration we briefly introduce the tool and show its usage for different scenarios such as reverse engineering and re-documentation of legacy code and documentation generation during development and maintenance of software.