On 7/16/06, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Perl script??
> Static??
Yes. Incidentally there is already at least one Perl script in the
build process (texi2html), and the help system is already effectively static.
> Here are my thoughts. Why not write it in Lisp, and make it possible for
> maxima users to add to the info, at least for their own new functions,
> interactively or via batch files. E.g. in a batch file,
> Describe(foobar): "piece of text or maybe xml or html ..."
> These could then be added to the hash table or search structure (which might
> be easier to read/write if it were a b-tree rather than hash table), and
> might also be good for partially-spelled items.
Making it possible to define help text incrementally might or might not
be workable and useful. Since it's beyond the scope of what I'm working
on at the moment, I'll let it go at that.
> For people using windows there is apparently a well-used "help" facility
> that might set a standard for data formats; perhaps our info could be dumped
> into that form and the help facilities could be used -- replacing our
> peculiarly formatted selection facility unnecessary.
Well, if someone wants to figure out how to generate the Windows
help format from texinfo, I wouldn't be opposed.
But even if we display help text in some kind of graphical browser,
we still need to have text-only help.
There seems to be a suggestion here to change the storage
format from texinfo to Windows help files. I don't see any benefit to that.
Robert