Hitchhiker's Guide to the Coq Source Tree
A bit of notation :
terms and types are written with the form symbol_name:path/to/sourcefile.ml or (symbol_name:type):path/to/sourcefile.ml the first time they are encountered, and can be shortened to symbol_name after.
TODO : refine notations conventions, to distinguish between terms and parameters and possibly include code as-is.
Adventures of a Vernac Command
There is two way to process strings coming from stdin. The first one is by looping over do_vernac:toplevel/toplevel.ml, and the second one by looping over parse_one_command_group:toplevel/protectedtoplevel.ml.
do_vernac reads a vernac Command from stdin through mt:lib/pp.ml4, resynch the toplevel command buffer and feeds (top_buffer.tokens:char Stream.t):toplevel/toplevel.ml to raw_do_vernac:toplevel/vernac.ml. raw_do_vernac is mainly a wrapper for vernac:toplevel/vernac.ml, which itself is a wrapper for vernac_com:toplevel/vernac.ml that automatically feeds it with the output of parse_phrase:toplevel/vernac.ml. vernac_com does a pattern matching on the parsing result to handle file loading or command timing, and then calls with_heavy_rollback:lib/states.ml with interp:toplevel/vernacentries.ml as its first parameter. interp does the big match on the vernac_expr:toplevel/vernacexpr.ml input and calls the appropriate function.
To be continued ...