On Sun, 2006-07-16 at 10:47 -0600, Robert Dodier wrote:
> The primary goal to make describe run faster;...
> A secondary goal is arrange the searchable topics so that
> different kinds of searches can be implemented
Great. That will be an important improvement to Maxima.
> The topic strings are keys for a hash table in which the
> associated value tells what info file to read, the byte offset
> of the item, and the length in bytes. Then retrieval is very fast.
Doesn't info already do something similar?
In /usr/local/info/maxima.info I see:
maxima.info-1: 245
maxima.info-2: 296309
...
Node: Lisp and Maxima^?21758
Which tells me that there is a section on "Lisp and Maxima" in the
file maxima-info-1, (21758-245) bytes from the start of the file.
I guess they do not give an offset since info might use some
special character to mark the end of a node.
> For the moment, the user interface is the same as before
> (i.e. user sees a list of items and chooses some).
It would be nice to be able to use more of the functionalities of
the info format. For example, if I look at the documentation using
the info program, I can navigate through the sections tree, search
for a keyword in the index, etc., and I think that program is fairly
fast.
Regards,
Jaime