I fixed 'help foo.foo' to return the default constructor signature when there is no constructor explicitly defined and also updated the tests in two additional changesets:

https://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/92ca2f6c6b85
https://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/c5dc54712378

The logic in these "help_system::raw_help*" functions seems a bit messy now, so maybe they could be better organized but at least they work now (I think).

This report can probably be closed now unless someone notices a problem with the latest changes.

I pushed the following changeset.  Marking as ready for test.

https://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/515c1cc1b45e

The missing semicolon was a mistake.  I'll fix it.

for consistency, should probably pick : or no : for the different formats.

I'm attaching a new version of the patch.  I thought it would be better to provide a method in the octave_user_function class to generate the function signature without any "undocumented function: " prefix.  The logic for deciding what to say about that signature is in the functions that search for the doc strings.

If this change looks OK, I can add a commit message and push to default.


(file #55871)

testing against default, I now get the following with the comment #0 checks:

defined at the CLI:

function y = no_doc_fcn (arg1, arg2, arg3)
end

>> help no_doc_fcn
'no_doc_fcn' is a command-line function

undocumented function:  y = no_doc_fcn (arg1, arg2, arg3)

Additional help for built-in functions and operators is
available in the online version of the manual.  Use the command
'doc <topic>' to search the manual index.

Help and information about Octave is also available on the WWW
at https://www.octave.org and via the help@octave.org
mailing list.

same function saved to a file:

>> help no_doc_fcn
'no_doc_fcn' is a function from the file /home/nrjank/source/builds/no_doc_fcn.m

undocumented function:  y = no_doc_fcn (arg1, arg2, arg3)

Additional help for built-in functions and operators is
available in the online version of the manual.  Use the command
'doc <topic>' to search the manual index.

Help and information about Octave is also available on the WWW
at https://www.octave.org and via the help@octave.org
mailing list.

I see there's also a change to undoc'd classes.  if i create a dummy class file no_doc_class.m:

classdef no_doc_class
  properties
  endproperties

  methods
  endmethods
endclassdef

I get:

>> help no_doc_class
'no_doc_class' is a class constructor from the file /home/nrjank/source/builds/no_doc_class.m

no_doc_class is an undocumented class

Additional help for built-in functions and operators is
available in the online version of the manual.  Use the command
'doc <topic>' to search the manual index.

Help and information about Octave is also available on the WWW
at https://www.octave.org and via the help@octave.org
mailing list.

This seems to be working and is an improvement. With all of the changes to looking for help inside classdef files, is there other expected behavior that should be checked depending on whether any parts of the file have a help string?

I hadn't looked but was wondering what get_help_text might already be parsing the file to be able to do that. then it could just continue to return [text, status] with text containing the function line

For .m file functions, my plan was to either grab the function text from the file when parsing or generate it from the parse tree.

I don't think we need to worry about what to do for built-in functions because all the ones we care to document should have doc strings.

Same for .oct file functions.  If you want to have something useful displayed, document your function.  There's no way we can automatically generate that info from a DEFUN or MexFunction declaration.

This is a very small thing.  When a programmer tries help() on a function without documentation Octave emits an error that the function is undocumented.  Matlab, however, prints the function prototype which might be at least mildly useful to the programmer.

Here is a simple m-file no_doc_fcn.m that shows what I'm looking for

function y = no_doc_fcn (arg1, arg2, arg3)
end

And when I try using help() I get

octave:1> help no_doc_fcn
error: help: 'no_doc_fcn' is not documented

What would be nice is something like

'no_doc_fcn' is a function from the file /home/xxx/no_doc_fcn.m

  y = no_doc_fcn (arg1, arg2, arg3)