From source code to publication: Code Diary, an automatic documentation parser for SAS

Abstract

Team members do not always review, or understand, all source code and the decisions that are made in it. Code developers and maintainers should have tools available to easily write, maintain, collate and share source code documentation. Institutional security demands often limit the types of software that researchers can install on their systems. It is, therefore, necessary to run a documentation tool natively within programs that are already installed. We developed Code Diary, an automatic documentation parser for SAS 9.3 and up. Code Diary provides a way to generate documentation natively from SAS source code. Keywords: Documentation, Up-to-date, Parser, Comments, SAS, Code-publication match