[gambit-list] Help system
Marc Feeley
feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Thu Feb 12 10:33:37 EST 2009
With release v4.4.1 there are a few features which allow documentation
to be accessed easily. The "help" procedure is documented on the
Gambit wiki here:
http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Documentation:Procedure_help
For example, the call (help table->list) will start a browser (the
text-only lynx browser by default) which views the section of the
Gambit manual documenting the table->list procedure.
There is also a REPL comma command for accessing the documentation.
The long form ,(h NAME) will view the procedure or special form NAME.
The short form ,h will view the procedure which raised the exception
which started the REPL.
The Gambit wiki now contains the documentation for all the Gambit
public procedures and special forms. It is currently a copy of the
documentation in the Gambit manual. Of course the advantage of the
wiki documentation is that it is editable. I'm hoping that people
will contribute to the documentation by adding comments, corrections,
examples, and information of interest to other users. The plan is to
integrate these contributions back to the Gambit manual on a regular
basis. Note that the Gambit manual uses the "texinfo" markup
language, and for consistency this is also the markup language that
the wiki documentation pages use (I wrote a texinfo to HTML plugin for
the wiki which handles <texinfo> ... </texinfo> tags). For the
integration to go smoothly the user contributions on the wiki should
also be in texinfo format.
The Gambit manual in HTML format and the wiki documentation are cross
linked. If you click on the procedure or special form name in the
HTML Gambit manual you will go to the page on the wiki documenting
that procedure or special form. If you click on the name on the wiki
you will go to the page in the HTML manual. This is useful when you
want to read contextual documentation (like chapter introductions,
related procedures, the table of contents, etc).
Marc
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