[playground] No parsing of TypeScript type information?

I’m experimenting with the TSDoc Playground and I can’t seem to make it parse TypeScript type information. Here’s a sample:

/**
 * Returns the average of two numbers.
 *
 * @remarks
 * This method is part of the {@link core-library#Statistics | Statistics subsystem}.
 *
 * @param x - The first input number
 * @param y - The second input number
 * @returns The arithmetic mean of `x` and `y`
 *
 * @beta
 */
function getAverage(x: number, y: number) {
    return (x + y) / 2.0;
}

As you can see, the ParamBlocks in the AST don’t include any type annotations for x and y.

  - ParamBlock
    - BlockTag
      * BlockTag="@param"
    * Spacing=" "
    * ParamBlock_ParameterName="x"
    * Spacing=" "
    * ParamBlock_Hyphen="-"
    * Spacing=" "
    - Section
      - Paragraph
        - PlainText
          * PlainText="The first input number"
        - SoftBreak
          * SoftBreak="\n"
  - ParamBlock
    - BlockTag
      * BlockTag="@param"
    * Spacing=" "
    * ParamBlock_ParameterName="y"
    * Spacing=" "
    * ParamBlock_Hyphen="-"
    * Spacing=" "
    - Section
      - Paragraph
        - PlainText
          * PlainText="The second input number"
        - SoftBreak
          * SoftBreak="\n"

Thoughts?

[liamross]

I understand that perhaps parsing the actual TypeScript code is outside of the scope of what TSDoc is trying to accomplish, but it was definitely something I hoped would be included since I first noticed this project gaining some traction.

In the README it says:

The majority of the standard JSDoc tags are preoccupied with providing type annotations for plain JavaScript, which is an irrelevant concern for a strongly-typed language such as TypeScript.

However, the fact that my documentation will have zero indication of the type of a parameter means that this could never serve as a replacement for JSDoc for me personally. If I write a library in TypeScript and it is consumed by a JavaScript application, I would like for there to be typings in the documentation, and not require that people are relying on IDE tooling or digging into the package to find types.

The first thing that drew me to this was the idea of it parsing types from the code to save the redundant declarations in the documentation.

Is there a reason why this is excluded from this project? It seems like a gap to not include typing in documentation personally.

[octogonz]

@fastfedo encountered the same confusion in https://github.com/Microsoft/tsdoc/issues/152#issuecomment-474026798 . He gave a couple suggestions:

Two things might have helped me here:

1. Documentation examples in/linked from the README that show usage with different TypeScript constructs (interface, type, class, enum, etc).

2. A note on the TSDoc playground that it’s not actually parsing TypeScript, or that only the first comment is being parsed, as you stated above. So the playground is not a place to explore how more complex types would be documented.