bugGNU Octave - Bugs: bug #31905, Doc : 'help' no longer documented...

 
 

bug #31905: Doc : 'help' no longer documented correctly

Submitter:  Rik <rik5>
Submitted:  Fri 17 Dec 2010 05:24:16 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  None Severity:  4 - Important
Priority:  5 - Normal Item Group:  Documentation
Status:  None Assigned to:  None
Originator Name:  Open/Closed:  * Closed
Release:  * dev Operating System:  * GNU/Linux
Fixed Release:  None Planned Release:  None
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Thu 20 Jan 2011 05:39:28 AM UTC, comment #4: 

Looks good.  Closing this issue.

Rik <rik5>
Group administrator
Wed 19 Jan 2011 10:09:22 AM UTC, comment #3: 

I checked in the following changeset:

http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/21c3e1370b82

It adds a --list option for the help command to allow it to list all available operators, keywords, built-in functions, and functions on the path in the current session of Octave.  I also edited the text in the manual to point to the --list option.

OK?  If so, then please close this report.

John W. Eaton <jwe>
Group administrator
Mon 27 Dec 2010 06:09:21 AM UTC, comment #2: 

I like the idea of categories, but it seems like it might be a lot to implement just now ahead of the 3.4 release.  What about having a function which simply listed the user-visible functions?  This would have the advantage of capturing user scripts and Octave-Forge scripts which wouldn't necessarily be in the @ref{Categorical List of Functions}.

A simple template for the function list might be


func_list = sort (vertcat (vertcat (__list_functions__ , __builtins__)));


Rik <rik5>
Group administrator
Fri 17 Dec 2010 06:39:51 PM UTC, comment #1: 

The text you are referring to is


In order to get good help you first need to know the name of the command
that you want to use.  This name of the function may not always be
obvious, but a good place to start is to just type @code{help}.
This will show you all the operators, reserved words, functions,
built-in variables, and function files.  An alternative is to search the
documentation using the @code{lookfor} function.  This function is
described in @ref{Getting Help}.


so I can see why you didn't quickly fix this...

Perhaps we need a categorical list of functions?  Then we could say something like


In order to get good help you first need to know the name of the command
that you want to use.  The name of the function may not always be
obvious, but a good place to start is to look in the categorical list of functions, @ref{Categorical List of Functions}.  An alternative is to search the
documentation using the @code{lookfor} function.  This function is
described in @ref{Getting Help}.


To quickly generate a list of functions by category, we could start by just doing something like


for f in *.txi; do
  echo "$f:"
  sed -n 's/@DOCSTRING(\([^)]*\))/  \1/p' $f | sort
done


and then generate subcategories by hand.

Longer term, we might add @category{} tags to the docstrings themselves so we can generate the entire list automatically.

John W. Eaton <jwe>
Group administrator
Fri 17 Dec 2010 05:24:16 PM UTC, original submission:  

Section 1.2.8 in intro.txi documents the old behavior of help which, when called without arguments, produced a list of available functions.

Rik <rik5>
Group administrator

 

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    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2011-01-20 rik5 Open/ClosedOpen Closed

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