Scheme and Common Lisp are much more different than I realised.
They have very different error handling models, object systems, approaches to documentation (e.g. use of docstrings), not to mention conventions on iteration, recursion and early termination.
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Many languages use docstrings rather than doc comments: it certainly makes extracting them easier. You just parse the code.
Could you go further and require all comments to be string literals? I'm struggling to think of many downsides.
Docstrings are an awesome features that make languages more ergonomic. They help you understand code on the first read, and there's pressure to write them when it's part of the language.
I suspect you can even get away with awful syntax if docstrings are ubiquitous.
Turns out that Emacs docstrings have an elaborate escaping mechanism. \[foo] shows the keybinding for foo, but \=\[foo] shows \[foo] literally.
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