help and man

[Eric Iverson]

Jan-Pieter,

I strongly prefer to have basic docs at my fingertips and with text in my session. This is usually enough and is much better for me than having to switch gears to find and study another window.

The unix man system is still the best!

I will make use of your help system and would love to see it expanded and in general use.

Sometimes, depending on work flow, primitive docs are less important than name docs.

Merging your help initiative with the JHS man tool would be great.

   load'~addons/ide/jhs/extra/man.ijs' NB. eventually in stdlib and include primitive help

   man'man' NB. man usage

   man'dir' NB. base library doc for dir

  NB. not yet, but perhaps coming

   man'+' NB.  doc for +

   man'*foreigns'

The next Jd release makes heavy use of the man tool.

[Jan-Pieter Jacobs]

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the nice words.

From the looks of it, your man system looks quite a bit more refined than my rather crude hack, though. I really like the name lookup in the scripts defining them.

It would make sense to integrate help for primitives and general concepts with man. The comment-based documentation makes it a lot more scalable than my file approach, as

only the primitives/general language topics/phrases would need to be separately provided. Though, man would be even more useful if comments weren't stripped in addons (like plot).

One thing I do value in my help is that searching also yields hits within the documentation body, not just the title/name (sort of like the Linux apropos command). For instance help'shape' would return not only a hit for the $ primitive, but also the entries for rank and parts of speech (currently it only returns "Parts of Speech" as its far from complete). It can thus also be used in "how do I do this in J" kind of situations, a bit like https://aplcart.info/ for APL.

I guess this is more difficult for the comment-based docs man uses, as it would require extracting all those comments in each loaded file, and storing them.

How would you see man merged with help?

Thanks,

Jan-Pieter

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