Source code documentation formats

Javadoc (also capitalized as JavaDoc or javadoc) is an API documentation generator for the Java programming language. Based on information in Java source code, Javadoc generates documentation formatted as HTML and other formats via extensions. Javadoc was created by Sun Microsystems and is owned by Oracle today.

reStructuredText (RST, ReST, or reST) is a plain-text markup language primarily used for technical documentation and other textual data. It serves a similar role as Markdown but includes additional semantic features for more complex document structuring. Prominent, large-scale, open-source projects that rely on reStructuredText include the Python programming language community for its official documentation, the Linux kernel docs, CMake, and the LLVM compiler project.

JSDoc is a markup language used to annotate and document JavaScript code. The comments can be processed by tools to produce documentation in formats such as HTML. The JSDoc specification is released under CC BY-SA 3.0, while its companion documentation generator and parser library is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

lightweight markup language used to document the Perl programming language

PHPDoc is an adaptation of the Javadoc format for the PHP programming language. It is still an informal standard for commenting PHP code, but in the process of being formalized. It allows external document generators like phpDocumentor, which is the de facto standard implementation, to generate documentation, and it helps some IDEs such as Zend Studio, NetBeans, JetBrains PhpStorm, ActiveState Komodo Edit and IDE, PHPEdit and Aptana Studio to interpret variable types and other ambiguities in the loosely typed language and to provide improved code completion, type hinting and debugging.

Noweb, stylised in lowercase as noweb, is a literate programming tool, created in 1989–1999 by Norman Ramsey, and designed to be simple, easily extensible and language independent.